Kelly C. Oppenheimer and The Manhattan Project PDF

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OPPENHEIMER AND THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

Insights into J Robert Oppenheimer, “Father of the Atomic Bomb”
Copyright © 2006 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
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November 15, 2005 9:50 B318: Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project (Ed: Yun Cheng Mok) fm
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
DEFYING THE ODDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Cynthia C. Kelly
President of the Atomic Heritage Foundation
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCING OPPENHEIMER . . . . . . . . 9

OPPENHEIMER RECONSIDERED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
The Honorable Jeff Bingaman
United States Senator from New Mexico
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER: KING OF THE HILL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Richard Rhodes
Author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun
A NOVEL IDEA OF OPPENHEIMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Joseph Kanon
Author of Los Alamos and The Prodigal Spy
CHAPTER 2: LIFE AT LOS ALAMOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

PRESERVATION ON THE PAJARITO PLATEAU . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Stuart Ashman
Director, Office of Cultural Affairs, State of New Mexico
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER AND THE STATE OF NEW MEXICO:
A RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Ferenc Szasz
Professor, Department of History, University of New Mexico
v
vi Contents
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER: A WINDOW ON HIS LIFE AT LOS ALAMOS . . 66

Kai Bird
Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center
for Scholars
Martin Sherwin
Professor of History at Tufts University
CHAPTER 3: OPPENHEIMER’S PLACE IN HISTORY . . . . . 77

STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Everet Beckner
Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs, National Nuclear
Security Administration, Department of Energy
THE CAUTIONARY TALE OF ROBERT OPPENHEIMER . . . . . . . . . . 86
Gregg Herken
Professor, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts,
University of California, Merced
THE EARLY YEARS OF ROBERT OPPENHEIMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Jon Hunner
Associate Professor, Director of Public History Program at
New Mexico State University
GENERAL GROVES’ INDISPENSABLE SCIENTIST . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Robert S. Norris
Natural Resources Defense Council
CHAPTER 4: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ON OPPENHEIMER 117

OPPENHEIMER AS A TEACHER OF PHYSICS AND PH.D. ADVISOR . . . . 119
Edward Gerjuoy
Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Pittsburgh
REMEMBERING OPJE: TEACHER, SCIENTIST AND FRIEND . . . . . . . 141
David Pines
Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter, University of
California Office of the President, Oakland, California
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER: CONSUMMATE PHYSICIST . . . . . . . . . 148
Maurice M. Shapiro
Professor, University of Maryland
Contents vii
A FEW WORDS FROM AN OPPENHEIMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

Andrew R. Oppenheimer
APPENDICES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
APPENDIX I — AGENDA FOR OPPENHEIMER AND THE
MANHATTAN PROJECT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
APPENDIX II — CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
November 15, 2005 9:50 B318: Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project (Ed: Yun Cheng Mok) introduction
Introduction
1
2
DEFYING THE ODDS
Cynthia C. Kelly
President of the Atomic Heritage Foundation
Investing two billion dollars in an attempt to build

an atomic bomb in the midst of World War II
was a serious gamble. While physicists understood
that enormous energy would be released when the
nucleus of an atom was split, harnessing that energy
would be an immensely complex challenge. The
odds of accomplishing this feat before the end of
the war were slim. Cynthia C. Kelly
When General Leslie Groves decided to choose J. Robert Oppenheimer

to lead the project, most who knew Oppenheimer were skeptical. While
Oppenheimer was widely acknowledged as a brilliant theoretical physicist,
he had little management experience to prepare himself for the task of direct-
ing what would be the most ambitious scientific and engineering undertaking
of the twentieth century.
At Berkeley, Oppenheimer
had a reputation for being a “smart
aleck,” often arrogant and impa-
tient with those who could not
keep up with him intellectually.
Could Oppenheimer recruit and
lead a team of hundreds of scientists
and engineers, military and sup-
port staff under highly pressured
and trying circumstances? These Oppenheimer at Berkeley
3
4 Introduction
reservations, coupled with Oppenheimer’s alleged Communist Party affilia-

tions, made his successful tenure as director of the project’s laboratory at Los
Alamos seem improbable.
Despite the long odds, the atomic bomb was produced in time to bring
an end to the war. Oppenheimer quickly proved himself to be an exquisite
manager of people, able to effectively motivate and deploy even those with
problematic personalities. While Robert R. Wilson expressed grave doubts at
first, “He had style and he had class,” Wilson told an interviewer in 1982,
“He was a very clever man. And whatever we felt about his deficiencies, in a
few months, he had corrected those deficiencies.”1 Oppenheimer’s charisma,
brilliance, and personal command of all aspects of the project made him an
extraordinary leader.
The government’s two-billion-dollar gamble paid off, bringing an end to
World War II and establishing the United States as a super power. However,
preserving some of the tangible properties of the Manhattan Project continues
to face long odds. Across the nation, most of the last remaining properties
from the Manhattan Project owned by the Department of Energy are slated
to be demolished as part of the environmental cleanup of the nuclear weapons
complex.
At Los Alamos, the Labora-
tory has identified a dozen prop-
erties of the fifty properties left in
its study called “Sentinels of the
Atomic Dawn.” While $700,000
is available from a Save America’s
Treasures grant, additional funds
will be needed to stabilize, pro-
S Site, Room 24 tect and restore these properties for
Courtesy of the Los Alamos Historical Society future generations.
At Oak Ridge, the K-25 plant was the world’s first gaseous diffusion
plant and produced enriched uranium for the Hiroshima bomb. A U-shaped
building with each of its arms extending one-half mile, the K-25 plant and over
one hundred other properties at the site are slated for demolition. Discussions
1 Bird and Sherwin, quote from Robert R. Wilson interview with Owen Gingrich, 23 April
1982, p. 4.
Defying the Odds 5
between the Department of Energy, the Advisory Council for Historic Preser-
vation, the Commonwealth of Tennessee and concerned parties are currently
focused on preserving the North End of the K-25 plant, three of the 54 units
that make up the plant. However, funds need to be found very soon to preserve
this section or in a few years there will be nothing left of one of the engineering
marvels of the twentieth century.
At Hanford, the fate of the B Reactor along the shores of the Columbia
is scheduled to be decided by the fall of 2005. Itself an engineering marvel,
the B Reactor was designed by Enrico Fermi and his team of physicists at the
University of Chicago. Pressured by President Franklin Roosevelt to take on
the task of constructing the reactor, the DuPont Company then translated
these concepts into engineering blueprints and assembled 50,000 workers to
build and operate it.
While the B Reactor has been open to the public for nearly twenty years,
the Department of Energy is planning to “cocoon” it, a process that would
destroy the reactor building and its historic integrity. The only prospect of
preserving it is to find an organization willing and able to commit to its long-
term operation and maintenance. One option is to incorporate the B Reactor
and other properties from the Manhattan Project into the national park system.
To investigate this alternative, Senators Domenici and Bingaman have
sponsored legislation to authorize a study to explore the feasibility of creating
a national park unit at one or more of the Manhattan Project sites.2 The study
will explore various management alternatives with continuing roles for the
Department of Energy as well as other Federal, State and local agencies that
have or may want to play various roles at these sites.
In addition, the FY 2004 Energy and Water Appropriations Act provided
one million dollars to take urgent actions to preserve the Manhattan Project
properties.The funds were intended to enable the Atomic Heritage Foundation
to continue its efforts nationwide and for the Manhattan Project communities
to address priorities such as capturing oral histories and stabilizing or restoring
properties and artifacts that are in danger of being lost to future generations.
In August 2004, the Atomic Heritage Foundation completed its report
to the Department of Energy on how best to preserve the most significant
2The Manhattan Project National Historic Park Site Study Act (PL 108-370).
6 Introduction
Manhattan Project properties and this history.3 The report considers the costs
of restoration and long-term stewardship as well as alternative management
strategies using local, state and other federal agencies, nonprofit organizations
and private resources. Because a number of decisions are still pending and the
difficulty of getting cost estimates for preservation, the report remains a “work
in progress.”
How long are the odds that we will be able to save some of the heritage of
the Manhattan Project? We have made a lot of progress in the last five years but
time is very short as the Department of Energy has many of these properties in
its sights for demolition. Is there sufficient public support? On the one hand,
there is enormous national interest in World War II. However, because of the
cloak of secrecy concerning nuclear weapons production, many people do not
know about the Manhattan Project and its role in World War II. Surveys of
those who visit the immensely popular Spy Museum in Washington, DC, find
that ninety percent of visitors do not know what the Manhattan Project was.
And yet, the development of the atomic bomb was one of the most
significant events of the twentieth century. As Richard Rhodes commented
at the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s symposium in April 2002: “The closing
days of the Second World War mark a turning point in human history, the
point of entry into a new era when humankind for the first time acquired the
means of its own destruction.” The legacy of the atomic bomb has permeated
every aspect of our lives and dominates world politics from Iraq to North
Korea.
To understand the twenty-first century world we live in, we must under-
stand the history of the atomic bomb and its indelible legacy. Having some
of the tangible remains of the Manhattan Project will help to bring the public
back to World War II when Hitler had taken over much of Europe and was
thought to be developing an atomic bomb. Here, scientists and engineers had
to draw upon their ingenuity, resourcefulness and determination as there were
no high-speed computers or sophisticated electronics. They were truly working
on the frontiers of science, with just microscopic quantities of uranium-235
and plutonium that needed to be analyzed and produced in quantities suffi-
cient to fuel an atomic bomb.
3 This report, “Preserving the Remains of the Manhattan Project,” is available at

http://www.atomicheritage.org/articles.htm or by calling the Atomic Heritage Foundation,
202-293-0045.
Defying the Odds 7
By witnessing first-hand the humble wooden sheds at Los Alamos where

key components of the bomb were assembled, the public can begin to grasp
some of the makeshift aspects of the effort. Preservation of some of the key
properties is essential to understanding how the United States and her allies
won the race to develop the world’s first atomic bomb, changing the course of
history forever.
The odds may be long but with the support and leadership of Senators
Domenici and Bingaman, Governor Bill Richardson, the Los Alamos National
Laboratory, Los Alamos County Council, Los Alamos Historical Society, and
many other organizations that are working in partnership with the Atomic
Heritage Foundation, I believe we can beat those odds. Like the Manhattan
Project workers, we need to draw upon our ingenuity, resourcefulness and
determination and work as a team.
Thanks for your interest and help in this venture.
November 15, 2005 9:49 B318: Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project (Ed: Yun Cheng Mok) ch01

CHAPTER ONE
Introducing Oppenheimer
9
10
OPPENHEIMER RECONSIDERED
The Honorable Jeff Bingaman

United States Senator from New Mexico
The story of Robert Oppenheimer is as timely

as today’s news and as timeless as a Greek
tragedy. He was a brilliant scientist who
devoted his talents to the service of his coun-
try. He was celebrated for making the atomic
bomb and vilified for not wanting to make
the hydrogen bomb. He helped unlock the
secrets of the atom for his country and, in
the end, his Government would not trust him
with those secrets.
His contributions to the Manhattan
Project and to Los Alamos are legendary. He
came up with the idea of a central weapons Senator Jeff Bingaman
laboratory, and he picked the site for it, here
at Los Alamos. Although there were many brilliant scientists and engineers
who made enormous contributions to the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer’s
contribution was unique. He was the Laboratory’s first director; he recruited
its original staff, and he led it to its wartime success.
Shortly after the war, Dr. Oppenheimer spoke eloquently of the
Manhattan Project as having “led us up those last few steps to the moun-
tain pass; and beyond there is a different country.” He left Los Alamos and
the Manhattan Project once the height was scaled, but he continued to help
us find our way through the new country. He felt a deep responsibility for his
work on the Manhattan Project and thought it was his duty to continue to
make his technical experience and judgment available to the Government.
11
12 Introducing Oppenheimer
For nine years after the war ended, the Government drew heavily upon
his talents. He served faithfully on numerous defense and nuclear policy com-
mittees. He chaired the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy
Commission. Under his leadership, the General Advisory Committee pro-
moted the development of this Laboratory, the production and perfection of
atomic weapons, and the development of nuclear reactors for submarines and
naval propulsion. But he (and a majority of the General Advisory Committee)
opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb.
It was Dr. Oppenheimer’s opposition to the H-bomb, more than any-
thing else, that made his opponents into enemies and fueled their suspicions
of his loyalty. Undoubtedly, Oppenheimer had friends and relatives who were
Communists. Most of those associations had been formed long before the war
and most had long since ended. All of them had been thoroughly scrutinized by
the Army when it cleared him in 1943 and by the Atomic Energy Commission
when it cleared him in 1947. They now became the basis of new allegations.
In December 1953, the Atomic Energy Commission formally charged him
with disloyalty and suspended his security clearance.
Dr. Oppenheimer replied, with great dignity, that he had no desire to
retain an advisory position if his advice was not needed, but that he could
not ignore the suggestion that he was “unfit for public service.” He decided
to answer the charges against him and asked for a hearing to clear his name.
What he got was not the objective “inquiry” called for by the Atomic Energy
Commission’s rules. It was a trial — there is no other word for it — and a
grossly unfair one at that.
The charges against Dr. Oppenheimer
were long and complex. Most involved
his past associations, which had already
been had already been thoroughly and
repeatedly invested. But the Commission
went further and charged him with having
“expressed” views opposing the development
of the H-bomb. That was the crux of the
matter.
Dr. Oppenheimer was tried, in secret,
before a specially-appointed three-member
J. Robert Oppenheimer personnel security board. He was prosecuted
Oppenheimer Reconsidered 13
by an aggressive former criminal prosecutor specially retained for the case.

The FBI bugged Oppenheimer’s conversations with his lawyers and potential
witnesses, and reported what it heard to the Commission. Evidence was with-
held from Oppenheimer and his attorneys. Legal standards were lowered to
meet the evidence. The whole affair was carefully orchestrated by the AEC’s
chairman, Lewis Strauss.
In the end, all three board members found Oppenheimer loyal, but
two of the three concluded that he was a security risk and recommended
that his security clearance not be restored. They found that his failure to give
“enthusiastic support” to the H-bomb program and his “highly persuasive
influence” among fellow scientists were not in “the strongest offensive military
interests of the country.”
Dr. Oppenheimer appealed the board’s decision to the five-member
Atomic Energy Commission. The Commission, by a four-to-one vote, found
Oppenheimer to be loyal, but by a different four-to-one vote, found him to be
a security risk. The Commission steered clear of the H-bomb charges, though
they probably played a role in its decision. Instead, the majority based its
decision on Oppenheimer’s character and his associations.
On June 29, 1954, fifty years ago on Tuesday, the Atomic Energy Com-
mission formally revoked Dr. Oppenheimer’s clearance, forever ending his
involvement in the atomic energy program. Ironically, Dr. Oppenheimer’s
term on the General Advisory Committee had expired two years before. His
only remaining contact with the AEC was a consulting contract, which was
scheduled to expire, along with his security clearance, the next day anyway.
History will be a fairer judge and will reach a truer verdict than the
Commission. Robert Oppenheimer will be remembered, I believe, as a bril-
liant scientist who applied his talents loyally and unstintingly to our national
defense. He will be remembered, too, as one who thought deeply about the
forces unleashed by the Manhattan Project, and realized how essential it is for
mankind to use wisely, in his words, “the new powers, the new alternatives, of
an advancing mastery of nature” for “his welfare and his freedom, and not his
destruction.”
The clouds over Robert Oppenheimer’s reputation have long since begun
to dissipate. His many friends and supporters, both in the Government and
in the scientific community, never doubted his loyalty. One such supporter
was Senator Clinton P. Anderson. When President Eisenhower nominated
Dr. Oppenheimer’s nemesis, Lewis Strauss, to be the Secretary of Commerce,

Senator Anderson led the opposition to the nomination. Lewis Strauss had
given Senator Anderson many reasons to oppose his nomination over the years,
but his abusive treatment of Dr. Oppenheimer was chief among them. The
Senate rarely rejects a cabinet nomination, but at Senator Anderson’s urging,
the Senate rejected Lewis Strauss’ nomination in 1959.
In 1963, President Kennedy selected Dr. Oppenheimer to receive the
Enrico Fermi award, which President Johnson bestowed on him after Pres-
ident Kennedy was assassinated. In 1994, the FBI publicly announced that
allegations that Dr. Oppenheimer had shared secrets with the Soviets were
“unfounded.”
I have sought to add to these efforts by sponsoring, along with
Senator Domenici and Senator Feinstein, a Senate resolution recognizing
Dr. Oppenheimer’s loyal service and contributions to the nation. The Sen-
ate unanimously agreed to the resolution Thursday evening.
In closing, I commend the Atomic Heritage Foundation for holding this
conference and for its efforts to preserve the Manhattan Project properties here
at Los Alamos and at other sites. I support these efforts and have sponsored
legislation in the Senate to have the Secretary of the Interior consider adding
the major Manhattan Project sites to the National Park System. The Senate
Committee on Energy and Natural Resources approved the bill in April and it
is now awaiting action by the full Senate. I think it is important that we save
this significant part of our history and our heritage for future generations.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER:
KING OF THE HILL
Richard Rhodes
Author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” and “Dark Sun”
The Manhattan Project is fading into myth. Sad

to say, the last of its first-rank leaders, Hans
Bethe, today lies mortally ill. The letter from
Einstein to Roosevelt eclipses the British MAUD
Report. Los Alamos, a laboratory on a mesa sur-
rounded by a wilderness, a small coterie of sci-
entists witching historic transmutations, eclipses
armies of workers and vast factories at Hanford
and Oak Ridge. Hiroshima eclipses Nagasaki,
poor Nagasaki, even as the war in Europe with Richard Rhodes
its epic D-Day extravaganza eclipses the longer Photo by Gail Evenari
and crueler Pacific War. And to our point here
today, Robert Oppenheimer, a century after his birth on April 2nd, 1904,
is rapidly eclipsing General Groves and half a hundred others as the shining
talent, the indispensable leader of the project, the Prospero of this historic
Tempest.
The true history, as we all know, was far otherwise: The MAUD Report
and three successive National Academy of Sciences reports turned the tide; the
first bombs were designed and built at Los Alamos, to be sure, but the armies
of workers and the vast factories produced their rare materials. Nagasaki suf-
fered equally with Hiroshima for the Japanese leadership’s refusal to surrender.
Russian determination, Allied Lend-Lease and invasion achieved victory in
Europe, but it needed atomic bombs to end the Pacific War. And no one who
15
was part of the Manhattan Project, even within the close, intense community
here on the Hill, doubted that General Groves was in charge. Nor did the
project lack for other colorful characters, larger than life-sized: Bethe, Edward
Teller, Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi, Vannevar Bush, Arthur Compton, Leo
Szilard, Harold Urey, Luis Alvarez, Emilio Segre, Eugene Wigner, Crawford
Greenewalt, Paul Tibbets, Ken Bainbridge, I. I. Rabi, George Kistiakowsky,
Deke Parsons, and of course Klaus Fuchs and many others — people whom I
and many of you here knew in person, though I was not fortunate enough to
meet Oppenheimer while he was alive.
It’s worth asking why one man, Robert Oppenheimer, should emerge
from such a rich and crowded field of candidates as the iconic central figure
of what is arguably the single most important historic development of the
twentieth century. I hope today’s symposium of Oppenheimer experts will at
least begin to answer that question, if an answer is possible to so obscure a
phenomenon as the making of myth.
That Robert Oppenheimer’s complexities should be reduced to a myth-
ical unity is ironic; his contemporaries found him various indeed. Tall, thin,
handsome, brilliant, with piercing blue eyes, chain-smoking, intense, elegant,
witty, cruelly dismissive when he chose to be, generous, passionate, idealistic,
but also divided within himself and by his own admission self-loathing, he
seemed different men to different people. Edward Teller told me that Robert
Oppenheimer was the finest lab director he had ever known, and I took
that assessment seriously: praise from a man’s worst enemy is praise indeed.
Hans Bethe told me Oppenheimer was able
to direct the effort at Los Alamos so suc-
cessfully because he was so much smarter
than everyone else, and Bethe included
himself in that comparison. Bethe told me
also — a more telling insight, I think —
that Oppenheimer had been casually cruel
to people who made mistakes around him,
including Bethe, before the war and after
the war, but that he suspended the hostili-
ties at Los Alamos.
Chester Barnard, president of New
J. Robert Oppenheimer Jersey Bell, described Oppenheimer in
Robert Oppenheimer: King of the Hill 17
1947 as “an extraordinary man who worked very hard and always seemed
to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”4 His students and his friends saw
him differently from his enemies, of course; to Lewis Strauss, Boris Pash and
William Borden, among others, Oppenheimer was a Machiavellian schemer
and a Communist spy. To Oppenheimer’s enemies, in the terrible security hear-
ing they imposed on him that condemned him to internal exile and destroyed
him, tough-minded I. I. Rabi had the irrefutable rebuttal:
The suspension of the clearance of Dr. Oppenheimer, [Rabi told the Gray
Board,] was a very unfortunate thing and should not have been done [. . .]
against a man who had accomplished what Dr. Oppenheimer has accom-
plished. There is a real positive record, the way I expressed it to a friend of
mine. We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it, and what more do you
want, mermaids?5
Rabi knew him well:

He was an aesthete, [Rabi described Oppenheimer to Bill Moyers.] I don’t
think he was a security risk. I do think he walked along the edge of a precipice.
He didn’t pay enough attention to the outward symbols. He was a very
American person of a certain kind. A certain kind of intellectual, aesthetic
person of the upper middle classes.6
On another occasion Rabi assessed his friend’s personal conflicts and their
consequences for his science:
I found him excellent, [Rabi said.] We got along very well. . . I enjoyed the
things about him that some people disliked. It’s true that you carried on a
charade with him. He lived a charade, and you went along with it. It was
fine — matching wits and so on. Oppenheimer was great fun, [Rabi goes
on,] and I took him for what he was. I understood his problem. . . [His
problem was] identity. . . He reminded me very much of a boyhood friend
about whom someone said that he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be
president of the B’nai B’rith or the Knights of Columbus. Perhaps he really
wanted to be both, simultaneously. Oppenheimer wanted every experience.
In that sense, he never focused. My own feeling, [Rabi concludes,] is that if
he had studied the Talmud and Hebrew, rather than Sanskrit, he would have
4 Quoted in Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun (Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 203.
5 Quoted in ibid., pp. 558–559.
6 Quoted in ibid., p. 559.
been a much greater physicist. I never ran into anyone who was brighter than
he was. But to be more original and profound I think you have to be more
focused.7
I am certainly not competent to judge if Oppenheimer’s science was less

original and profound than it might have been. Perhaps Rabi was. Others
today will discuss other periods of Oppenheimer’s life and career and perhaps
address Rabi’s contention as well. I want to look briefly at what I believe
to be Oppenheimer’s greatest achievement after the bomb itself, an original
and profound achievement indeed, and neglected in something of the same
way that the original discovery of the antibiotic properties of penicillin was
neglected, resting in the files waiting to be pulled out and understood for
what it is; the only ultimate answer to the hard, cruel fact of the bomb, to
Curtis LeMay’s “the bombers always get through” and William Borden’s “there
will be no time”: I mean the Acheson–Lilienthal Report that Oppenheimer in
1946 guided his four colleagues on Acheson’s panel of expert consultants to
prepare.8
In the curious way of government reports — John Manley once com-
mented sardonically that “quite contrary to the way I thought things were [in
Washington,] you don’t do staff work and then make a decision. You make
a decision and then do the staff work” — the Acheson–Lilienthal Report
originated in the Truman Administration’s late-1945 Agreed Declaration with
Britain and Canada to “prevent the use of atomic energy for destructive pur-
poses” and to “promote the [. . .] utilization of atomic energy for peaceful and
humanitarian ends.” Such action required a plan; Jimmy Byrnes as Secre-
tary of State got the job of devising it. Byrnes appointed a protesting Dean
Acheson chairman of a committee that included General Groves, Vannevar
Bush, James Bryant Conant and John J. McCloy. Acheson in turn appointed
the five-man panel. David Lilienthal, chairman of the TVA, chaired it, and
besides Oppenheimer, it included Monsanto chemist Charles Thomas, Gen-
eral Electric engineer Harry Winne and Chester Barnard — not exactly a
bunch of wild-eyed internationalists.
7 Quoted in ibid., pp. 240–241.

8The discussion that follows is paraphrased from ibid., pp. 229–233, where citations may be
found for quotations.
Oppenheimer came prepared. He had explored the complexities of inter-

national control not only with Niels Bohr at Los Alamos and with Conant
but also with Rabi. “Oppenheimer and I met frequently and discussed these
questions thoroughly,” Rabi said later. “Once [Oppenheimer] got interested in
something, he went right on to become the leader of it.” Gordon Arneson, the
State Department’s specialist on atomic matters, says Oppenheimer became
“the chief teacher for the Acheson–Lilienthal group.”
The men met first in Washington. Oppenheimer gave them a ten-day
course in nuclear physics, properly taking control, as the only real expert, of
defining the technical basis of the problem, but other than serving as their
savant he kept his own council at first. They moved next to New York to talk
to a group of scientists, including Luis Alvarez, who had explored for Groves
a scheme of control by inspection alone, involving what we would now call
national technical means.
Discussion intensified. Ideas came from every side — these were men of
diverse background and conviction — and they debated them night and day.
When patience gave way to exasperation and someone proposed simply outlaw-
ing the bomb, which happened frequently, Lilienthal always waved a newspaper
clipping about the Agreed Declaration to remind them that their government
had already committed itself to international control. Back to Washington
to study geology. They made progress. Then they got seriously stuck. Lilien-
thal proposed they tour Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. Whiskey on the train
down to Knoxville and a hung-over tour of the vast gaseous-diffusion plant,
where supervisors prowled among
the surrealistic piping on bicycles,
warmed their friendship.
They flew to Los Alamos in
Groves’s private C-54. The President
was trying to reach Lilienthal — to
offer him a Cabinet post as Secre-
tary of the Interior, the TVA chairman
wrongly thought — but not even that
provocation dulled him to the signif- General Leslie R. Groves and
icance of the secret mesa, as he wrote, David Lilienthal
. . .with the high mountains forming a majestic backdrop [where they] went
into casual little buildings, saw things only few men have seen, talked
with soft-spoken, gentle, intelligent men about the things they had done. . .
Now I have sense, [Lilienthal concluded,] that this thing of atomic bombs
is real. . .
Herb Marks, Acheson’s personal representative to the panel, who accom-

panied the men on their travels, caught the mood and a whiff of the essence
of the problem:
It wasn’t a large place, [he wrote of the building here on the Hill where
they examined the unassembled components of the few bombs yet in the
stockpile,] . . . and it wasn’t a spectacular one. I looked around me and there
were the same materials, colors, textures and fabrics you might see in any
warehouse. I saw the receptacles that contained the labor of God-knows-how-
many men, the cargoes of thousands of freight cars, the mental triumphs of
gifted scientists born in a dozen countries. The receptacles were small, and
I thought to myself: Hell! I could walk out of here with one of them in my
pocket. Not that I could have. Too many soldiers outside and inside the vault
were watching us closely — tough troops who looked as though they kept
their rifles cleaned. And supposing I had got away with one, what could I,
an ordinary layman, have done with it? In a way, the same was true of so
much of the whole Manhattan District.
Marks concludes:
It bore no relation to the industrial or social life of the country; it was a
separate state, with its own airplanes and its own factories and its thousands
of secrets. It had a peculiar sovereignty, one that could bring about the end,
peacefully or violently, of all other sovereignties.
What that panel of hard-eyed, practical men came to was a radical proposal.
Remarkably, it won their common agreement. When Bohr read it he wrote
Oppenheimer of his “deep pleasure.” In every word of it, he said, he found
just the spirit which I think offers the best hopes for the development in
which we all put our whole faith.
Most of you know what was in that report, though I wonder every time
I reread it if anyone in authority ever quite grasped the full importance of
its argument. It was nothing less than an argument for abolition when no
more than a few bombs had yet been built, anticipating the nuclear arms race
and all its near misses and understanding that the bombers (or the missiles)
always get through. “Any system,” it argued, “based on outlawing the purely
military development of atomic energy and relying solely on inspection for
enforcement would at the outset be surrounded by conditions which would
destroy the system.” To the contrary, “every stage in the activity, leading from
raw materials to weapons, needs some sort of control.” If, for example, a
putative international Atomic Development Authority were the only entity
that could legally own and process uranium ore, then “not the purpose of
those who mine or possess uranium ore but the mere fact of their mining or
possessing it becomes illegal, and national violation is an unambiguous danger
signal of warlike purposes. The very opening of a mine by anyone other than
the international agency is a ‘red light’ without more; it is not necessary to wait
for evidence that the product of that mine is going to be misused.” And if the
Authority spread its mines and factories and laboratories and reactors around
the world, so that their benefits could be shared, then “the real protection will
lie in the fact that if any nation seizes the plants or the stockpiles that are
situated in its territory, other nations will have similar facilities and materials
situated within their own borders so that the act of seizure need not place them
at a disadvantage.”
This remarkable idea — spreading the intrinsically dangerous mines and
factories around — is indistinguishable from what has come to be called nuclear
proliferation, except that the agent of proliferation in the Acheson–Lilienthal
Report would have been an organ of the United Nations rather than individ-
ual states, and the technology that proliferated would have been infrastructure
alone rather than infrastructure and stockpiled weapons. Though the report
does not belabor the point, it notes more than once that true security is incom-
patible with secrecy. Its proposal for a radical system of self-policing makes
starkly clear what the condition that Niels Bohr had called an “open world”
would be: a world where how to design atomic bombs might be public knowl-
edge (as it has come to some extent to be); a world, as it were, where the
guns have all been laid out together in the open on a table, but disassem-
bled, and arranged so as to be within everyone’s equal reach. Would it have
worked? In a much more unstable and dangerous form, as state-sponsored
nuclear proliferation, it did, and does. It would work without warheads and
weapons in a world with much greater transparency than presently obtains.
We are moving rapidly toward that transparency as new technologies penetrate
privacy and sweep secrets away; it’s no great prediction to say that by 2050 the
only privacy that will be left in the world will be the privacy we legislate for
ourselves.
Oppenheimer and his colleagues’ farsighted proposal may have been
premature. Certainly the Soviet Union had no intention of abrogating atomic
arms until it knew how to build them. Bernard Baruch, who modified the
Acheson–Lilienthal Report into his Baruch Plan to present to the United
Nations, missed the point completely when he complained that the Report
“did not deal with the problem of enforcement.” That’s what the Report’s “red
light” was about: a move to commandeer any part of the nuclear infrastructure
would be an act of war, to which other nations might respond accordingly.
Baruch added a clause promising “swift and sure enforcement” and demanded
that the Security Council give up veto authority in atomic matters, guarantee-
ing the rejection of his version of the plan. Oppenheimer, observing that the
United Nations was hardly the place to forge agreement on the highest matters
of national security policy, judged that his government was not serious about
international control.
Oppenheimer chaired one more panel on disarmament, for Dean
Acheson, in 1952. Vannevar Bush and Allen Dulles sat among its members;
McGeorge Bundy served as secretary and rapporteur — once again, experien-
ced and sober men, for whom only a paranoid could imagine that
Oppenheimer might serve as a Svengali. As had the Acheson–Lilienthal
Report, Oppenheimer’s panel also came to a conclusion about the new
knowledge of how to release nuclear energy that is as valid today as it was
then, and as inescapably final:
Fundamentally, and in the long run, the problem which is posed by the
release of atomic energy is a problem of the ability of the human race to
govern itself without war. There is no permanent method of excising atomic
energy from our affairs, now that men know how it can be released. Even
if some reasonably complete international control of atomic energy should
be established, knowledge would persist, and it is hard to see how there
could be any major war in which one side or another would not eventually
make and use atomic bombs. In this respect the problem of armaments was
permanently and drastically altered in 1945.9
Nuclear weapons made supposedly more useable and therefore credibly deter-
rent with lower yields will not solve the problem, nor will bunker busters,
9 Quoted in ibid., p. 588.

nor will missile defenses, nor will preemptive wars. Only the deterrence of
knowledge in an open world — which means, practically speaking, nothing
more utopian than delivery times from mothballed factory to target of three
months rather than delivery times from silo to target of thirty minutes —
only the deterrence of knowledge without stockpiles will buy the world the
space it needs to come to its senses or act in concert whenever an entity bent
on domination attempts to violate the ban. Which is another way of saying
that the problem will never go away. Of course it won’t: knowledge of how
to release nuclear energy is new knowledge of the natural world, to which the
human world has no choice but to adapt or be destroyed, just as knowledge of
global warming is new knowledge of the natural world, just as knowledge of
HIV and other scourges is new knowledge of the natural world. With Bohr,
Oppenheimer understood that truth, and it was a deeper understanding than
theoretical physics, original and profound.
Well. That’s part of my understanding of who Robert Oppenheimer was.
Speakers yet to come will have other views and other insights. I got to know
Oppenheimer’s protégé and close friend Robert (Bob) Serber late in Bob’s life
when we worked together editing The Los Alamos Primer for publication —
they were Bob’s lectures, and he thought they ought to be in print. After many
meetings with him, when I thought I knew him a little, I finally worked up
the courage to ask him if my portrait of his friend in my book The Making
of the Atomic Bomb was at all accurate. Bob was a kind man. He thought for
awhile, and then he said, “Well, of the books I’ve read about Oppie (this was
several years ago) I’d say it’s the least inaccurate.”
So I’m looking forward to hearing the even less inaccurate portraits yet
to come of a complex, charismatic man.
Thank you.
A NOVEL IDEA OF OPPENHEIMER
Joseph Kanon
Author of “Los Alamos” and “The Prodigal Spy”
It’s an honor for me to be with you today, and some-

thing of a surprise. I am not a historian, and certainly
not a scientist. I may, in fact, be the only person here
who had trouble with high school physics — basic
high school physics. But life, as any physicist can
tell you, is unpredictable. After I published my novel
Los Alamos, which is what Graham Greene used to call
an “entertainment,” I found myself, with no scientific
knowledge at all, being welcomed, taken in — a sort
of second cousin, three or four times removed — to
this extraordinary scientific community.
Many of you have written to me, or come up
Joseph Kanon to me at book signings, and have shared anecdotes,
stories about the Hill; sometimes as if I had actually
been here with you on the Project. A few of the letters were scolding. It may be
that because we now so readily accept spin in our public lives, we’ve come to
demand more accuracy in our fiction — but in any case I’m not allowed to get
away with much. I’ve been corrected about the location of the laundry in the
Sundt units (this to prove that you couldn’t hear people making love through
the walls). I’ve been told the back road to Jemez wasn’t paved in 1945 and that
a roadhouse outside Nageezi — wholly imaginary, by the way — was in the
wrong location. I’ve treasured all these letters, partly because I do like to get
things right and partly because they suggest that the Los Alamos I imagined
was reasonably close to the one you knew. But how do you get a person right?
How do you get Oppenheimer right?
24
A Novel Idea of Oppenheimer 25
When the organizers of this symposium asked me to speak, I said, “You

know, I didn’t know Robert Oppenheimer” And they said, “But you knew him
in a way no one else did — you had to make him up. Tell them how you did it.”
That sounded to me suspiciously like “How does one write fiction?”, a subject
as slippery and as filled with unknowns as physics. But the question intrigued
me. How do you make a real person a character? I never met Oppenheimer
and yet he, or a version of him, is someone I know intimately, someone who
lived inside my head for months. Now it may be, in an existential sense, that
we always make people up — how do we truly know someone else? But in this
case, the question was more pragmatic: how do you put him on a page?
When did I start imagining him? Another pragmatic answer: it was the
summer of 1995, almost exactly this week in June, by the way, and I’d come
to Los Alamos as a tourist. I spent hours in Fuller Lodge, looking at drivers’
licenses with anonymous numbers and passes and old photographs — what
are now the personal artifacts of the Project — and what fascinated me most
was the secret nature of the Project. Outside, walking around Ashley Pond, I
felt I was in an almost prototypical American town, a place just like anywhere
else, and yet in 1945 this was the most secret place on earth. Technically and
officially, it did not exist. If you signed on for the Project you literally left the
rest of the world behind, communicating through box numbers. What was
that like? And it was at that moment that, as the cartoons would have it, a little
light bulb went off over my head. What would have happened, I wondered, if
there had been a crime? How would they go about solving it? There wouldn’t
be any police: no one but the Army, and its MPs, was allowed up on the mesa.
No one, in fact, was even supposed to know the town was here. How do you
solve a crime in a place so secret it doesn’t officially exist? I didn’t know then
the question would be so intriguing that I would spend a year answering it.
But something else happened that summer that drew me deeper into Los
Alamos’s history. It was the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima and, as might
be expected, there was a lot of media coverage, much of it revisionist. Every
generation, of course, looks at the world through its own perspective, and
inevitably, and justifiably, any re-examination of the bomb now brings with it
the baggage of fifty years of ambivalence and outright fear. I grew up under
the mushroom cloud, too, and I ducked under desks during air raid drills,
the way I think all of us of a certain age did, and those fears and ambiva-
lences were all too familiar. And yet I thought that what I was reading seemed
skewed, not quite right. It didn’t fit

with what I’d seen in Fuller Lodge,
or with what I knew about the
project in general. The scientists had
become demonized. The reality, I
thought, was so much more compli-
cated and interesting. The average age
of the scientists on the project was
27: Demons? Or just smart, ambi-
Fuller Lodge tious kids, who thought they were
Courtesy of the Los Alamos Historical Society
doing the right thing, for the right rea-
sons? And yet created such appalling
consequences. The idea took hold of me and wouldn’t let go. What was it
like for them? It’s very hard for us now to capture the hope and urgency and
patriotism of the Manhattan Project — it was, as they say, a different time.
But fiction demands a peculiar form of empathy and it often begins, as it did
here, with the simple question: what if it had been you? What if you had been
the 27-year-old scientist, a kid from Caltech perhaps, and someone had said,
“We want you to come to work for the government on a secret project. You
will be working with the finest minds in your field. You will cross a frontier in
science. You will win the war.” I realized that I would have said “Yes,” would
have been one of the people who helped make the bomb. And who later would
have wondered what I had done.
So I was intrigued by the secrecy, then fascinated by the moral ambiguity,
and began writing the book in my head. What had it been like? And the Los
Alamos Historical Society (to whom all thanks and praise) luckily had exactly
the sort of material I was looking for: not diagrams of implosion lenses, but
descriptions of the housing units (and the order of their desirability), the utility
bills (how much did it cost a month?), the coal deliveries, all the stuff of daily
life that really forms the back story to any work of fiction and indeed to any
understanding of a community.
Sometimes you can see things in a statistic. When Los Alamos is selected
at the end of ’42 as the site, one of the reasons, of course, is that the boys’ school
provided an existing infrastructure — the water tower, some buildings — for
what is anticipated to be about 500 people. By the spring of ’45, when the
book is set, there were 5,000 people on the mesa, and simply by looking at
these numbers I could imagine the hill as a constant building site: lumber
trucks rolling in the background, carpenters hammering all day long, activity
that never stopped. The statistic that was mentioned earlier this morning about
the growth of the nursery in itself gives you a clue to who was filling those new
housing units — young married couples, for whom the Hill was often their first
home. And sometimes a scene will fall right into your lap. I read somewhere
that Indian maids were bussed up the mesa twice a week — evidently they
were not considered a security risk — and I thought, in the most secret place
on earth, there was maid service? What novelist would resist?
So the light bulb became a
story and I started my own secret
project. I never told anyone I was
writing it, in part because I had
never written before and I was a
publisher — and what could be
more embarrassing than a pub-
lisher who couldn’t write? And
Laundry at Los Alamos
certainly at that stage I had no
intention of writing about Robert Oppenheimer. I have always had mixed
feelings about the use of real people in fiction. Aside from anything else, read-
ers bring their own ideas about them to the page — they already know what
they feel. And in this particular case, the last thing I wanted to do was in
any way trivialize or misrepresent a figure I respected and admired. I thought
enough mud had been thrown at Oppenheimer during his life — I didn’t want,
even inadvertently, to add to the damage. Nevertheless, in the story someone
has to authorize an investigation and it seemed to me as silly to pretend that
the Manhattan Project director was, say, “Joe Dawes” as it was to pretend that
Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t President. It couldn’t be anybody but Oppenheimer.
So I took a small breath and thought: right, I only need him for one
scene. Do no harm, make it as innocuous as possible, and move on. And then,
just as I think happened in real life with Oppenheimer, the moment he opened
his mouth, he took over. He started talking on the page with an ease that none
of the other characters had for me and one scene led to another — I couldn’t
get him to stop. I realized that he had become not just a major character in
the story but the key to what I really had wanted to write about all along,
the story behind the entertainment, the thriller front, of the Project in all its
contradictions. For me, as for so many others, Oppenheimer was the Project.
As was once said of Teddy Roosevelt, “He was the groom at every wedding.”
It is, of course, unfair to embody an entire enterprise like this in one person,
but Oppenheimer’s personality (as I think everyone has indicated here today)
is a fatal attraction. It’s so complicated that you feel that if you can just get
him right, you can understand the rest a little.
But how do you get him right? How do you imagine Oppenheimer?
The least satisfactory route, ironically enough, was his own words. The letters
(recently reissued by Stanford) are certainly wonderful and interesting, but he
was famously elusive and ambiguous, as we know, and never more so than in
his writing. (And perhaps bored — his only “B” at Harvard was Freshman
Comp.) Partly this is a function, I think, of his quick, mercurial mind. He
was too fast for prose. He would shift, he would change his mind. He was too
smart not to change his mind. Like real mercury, he was fluid, not fixed. Later,
in the hearings, this would have a devastating effect. “What did you think in
1947? In 1949? In 1951?” Well, he thought different things. Didn’t you? I
would have. But at a hearing this was considered inconsistent, and perhaps
duplicitous.
Sometimes the letters are less than useful because of his own myth-
making — he was probably as guilty of this as most famous people are. One
of the most quoted of all Oppenheimer lines, of course, is what he said went
through his mind after the test at Alamogordo, the line from the Bhagavad-
Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” It’s a wonderful line; the
only problem is that the first time he ever said he thought this was three years
later, in 1948. He may well have thought it at the time, but what his brother
Frank tells us he actually said was, “It works.”
Of course, because he was so famous, getting all the outside details
right was easy. We know what he looked like, how he spoke, how he dressed,
even how much he smoked — as someone said earlier, four to five packs
a day. Indeed, apart from Einstein, he was probably the only scientist the
general public knew at all. His hat became an icon of the period. So there
were photographs, seemingly countless photographs, always useful sources. If
you’re imagining Oppenheimer, you can spend hours looking at these. Like
many charismatic people, Oppenheimer photographed very well; the camera
loved him. I have a copy of an Eisenstadt photo at home that somebody gave
me, and I’ve kept it, not just because of the unexpected role that Oppenheimer
came to play in my life, but because it’s a great picture. I wouldn’t say that
when you look into his eyes you can see his soul, but you can definitely see
something. The photographs taken on the hill, at parties, in casual groups,
are particularly interesting and poignant, with none of the strain and bleak
disappointment that sometimes appears in the later years. He may have been
busy and exhausted and under pressure, but in these pictures he always looks
as if he’s having the time of his life. And, of course, he was.
Even more useful was what other people said about him, and they all said
something. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything about Los Alamos in which
he doesn’t appear, a mass of character detail to draw on and use. People agreed
his eyes were mesmerizing, so I used that. Someone said that he had the gift of
intimacy — when he spoke to you, he made you feel you were the only person
in the room — so I used that. I also used what I imagine must have been its
opposite, that when he stopped talking to you, you felt somehow cast out, no
longer in the light.
More specious as a technique, I’m afraid, but one that writers use all
the time, is drawing what you can from your own life. It so happens that
Oppenheimer and I had gone to the same universities, first Harvard and then
Cambridge (although it need not be said that I wasn’t at the Cavendish Lab),
so I knew a little bit about what he’d experienced there. I had run a company
for many years, and so I had a fair idea of how much of his day must have
been spent in meetings, and dealing with personnel: juggling people, juggling
appointments, trying to please everybody and sometimes pleasing no one, not
even you. Practically nobody writes about Oppenheimer as an administrator,
as a desk man, but he was, and he was good. I think it’s probably the reason
his prickly relationship with General Groves worked as well as it did. Groves
admired anyone, even an intellectual, who could get things done.
But finally, in then end, to imagine Oppenheimer, you have to let the
real one go. Fiction can never have the complexity of real life, and who could
have made up Oppenheimer? We’ve heard all the adjectives today: brilliant,
arrogant, brittle, empathetic, self-doubting, proud of what he’d accomplished,
dismayed at what he’d accomplished. Maybe he was myth-making when he
said, “I am become Death,” and maybe he did think it, when that first extraor-
dinary flash of light ripped through the sky. The point is that we can believe
he did. This is a man who wrote in 1964 to Max Born, his former mentor, and
now a public opponent of nuclear weapons, “I have felt a certain disapproval
on your part for much of what I have done. This has always seemed to me
quite natural, for it is a sentiment I share.” Did he mean it? Maybe yes, maybe
no. I think, probably both. It was Scott Fitzgerald who said that the test of
a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind
at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. Who better, then, to
hold two ideas at the same time?
He is, in short, a great character — larger than life even in real life. Fiction
can’t take him in. When you invent Oppenheimer, what you have to do is settle
for a piece, or at the most, a few pieces of the puzzle. But fiction does have one
great advantage: you get to choose the pieces you want. My Oppenheimer is
the Los Alamos Oppenheimer, when his life was as triumphant as the Project
itself. A time not without crises or doubts, but not the frightened, vindictive
world he would inherit after he made his bargain with the devil.
That devil was not, I think,
atomic energy, for all its terrify-
ing qualities, but the more familiar
one: fame and power. The devil for
Oppenheimer was in Washington,
a place with no room for his daz-
zling, supple intelligence. Different
skills were required there. Having
fathered the bomb, Oppenheimer
wanted to be its conscience. He had
Oppenheimer and Dorothy McKibbin at been a hero of one war, but there
Los Alamos was no place for him in this new
Courtesy of the Los Alamos Historical Society one. He could have been shown the
door quietly. Instead he was publicly humiliated, in a way that now looms
almost as large in the Oppenheimer legend as the Los Alamos years, and
which still resonates in the scientific community.
There is about Oppenheimer’s later years that puzzled, the slightly dazed
quality of any smart little boy who discovers there are bullies in the playground.
Worse, that they are running it. Oppenheimer had often been envied — now he
found he had real enemies, and not even his intelligence and achievement could
protect him against them. He had expected to remain a world figure. Instead,
he was set adrift into a profound disappointment. Maybe it shouldn’t have
mattered to him, but it did. Maybe the last years needn’t have played out as they
did — his troubled wife Kitty, lost in her own downward spiral; his reputation
growing more and more distant; his Fermi Award (bitter irony) received while
still denied access to material he had helped create. Oppenheimer was never
to be officially rehabilitated. But time has a way of sorting things out. Does
anyone now remember Lewis Strauss as someone other than the playground
bully who had it in for Oppenheimer? How many will attend his centennial?
Martyrdom is now an inevitable piece of the Oppenheimer character,
but not of the one I made up. The Oppenheimer I imagined does not yet know
what is to come, even if we do. He is forever in these pages the king of the
hill, the groom at every wedding, the person you want to talk to at the party.
He knows this is his chance and he is reaching for greatness. And finding it.
He is accomplishing the impossible, he is winning the war, and he is creating
a complicated legacy for himself and for all of us. It wasn’t difficult to imagine
this Oppenheimer. He is as real, I think, as any of them, and he’s certainly the
one I want to remember.

CHAPTER TWO
Life at Los Alamos
33
34
PRESERVATION ON THE PAJARITO

PLATEAU
Stuart Ashman
Director, Office of Cultural Affairs, State of New Mexico
I’d like to highlight the historic significance of

the Manhattan Project and the activities that
took place here in the middle of the last cen-
tury. But before that, I’d like to relate some-
thing that happened to me which exemplifies
the kind of place this is. On my way to the
Symposium, I stopped at a convenience store.
I suppose the clerk knew I was coming to the
conference by the way I was dressed, and he
volunteered that his father worked at the lab
from 1947 to 1953, part of that time along-
Stuart Ashman
side Enrico Fermi. Imagine: a convenience
store clerk in a small town!
As a former art museum director, I wanted to point out that it is widely
accepted in our world that the detonation at the Trinity Site was a turn-
ing point for New Mexico as an artistic center. No longer was this place
an isolated oasis inhabited by indigenous peoples. It was now part of a big-
ger world, and had a new reality, artistically, and in every other way. There
was a great dichotomy here between the worlds that got thrown together
and resulted in the Manhattan Project. Not just politics and science, not
just fascism and democracy, but the two separate worlds that coexisted right
here in Los Alamos before the development resulting from the Manhattan
Project.
35
36 Life at Los Alamos
The site selected for the top secret research on the atomic bomb com-
bined two lifestyles, two separate worlds. On the one hand, the government
in 1942 took over the Los Alamos Boys’ Ranch School, one of the most exclu-
sive boarding and prep schools in the United States. In one fell swoop, the
government ended Ashley Pond’s dream and the school’s 26-year history of
playing host to the sons of some of the Eastern seaboard’s most prominent
industrialists.
At the same time, it also forever ended a seasonal migratory lifestyle
practised by three generations of Hispanic farmers. Each summer, farmers who
wintered in the Rio Grande would migrate to the Pajarito Plateau for the cooler
temperatures at the 8,000-plus feet to grow summer crops and raise cattle.
The roads, they built for the biannual migrations and for hauling products
to market traverse deep canyon walls and rugged arroyos. The routes still can
be seen today as narrow, rough roads built on embankments to accommodate
them as they crossed the high mesa and descended into the narrow, steep
canyons that bisect the landscape.
At the Ranch School, under Pond’s philosophy of building men from
boys by exposing them to harsh conditions and manual labor, the sons of these
industrialists built a second set of roads. These roads were built for horseback
riding and provided access to remote areas as part of Pond’s “learning by doing”
philosophy. The trails were more notable for their craftsmanship, featuring
switchbacks, and sophisticated embankments made with rocks cut and fitted
by the students. Along with the wagon roads of the migrating homesteaders,
they may have provided a framework for transportation routes during the
construction of the Manhattan Project.
Although the lifestyles of the migratory farmers and the wealthy busi-
nessmen of tomorrow were disparate, they coexisted and provided support
for one another. The farmers grew crops and raised cattle, and sold these to
the Boys’ School, providing them with produce, dairy and meat. The proceeds
paid the farmers’ taxes and enabled them to continue their tradition of migrat-
ing in summer to the plateau. The contribution that the roads and trails made
to New Mexico’s history and eventually to that of the nation were recognized
last fall, when they were listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Of the 800 acres of ranch property and 2,900 acres of homestead property
taken over for the Manhattan Project, few historic resources remain to tell the
Preservation on the Pajarito Plateau 37
story. Fuller Lodge, the headquarters, recreation center and guest house for
the Ranch School, and many of the trails tell part of the story. They are still
used today and are cherished by the community. So are the buildings known
as “Bathtub Row.” This string of small cottages were used as faculty housing
at the Boys’ Ranch and got their nickname because of their superior plumbing
facilities! They later housed the scientists who built the atomic bomb.
There are other resources on the Hill
that tell the story of the Manhattan Project
and the ensuing Cold War era that still exist
and are in use today. The Los Alamos Post
Office was built just after the war as part
of a multimillion-dollar community center
funded by the Atomic Energy Commission.
Much of the community center was subse-
quently altered, but the post office with its
handsome thunderbird grills and large verti-
cal window bays continue to tell the story of
Los Alamos after the war. The architect, W.C.
Kruger, went on to design the Roundhouse,
the state capital in Santa Fe. Pueblo Indians of New Mexico
The history of the Pajarito Plateau goes Courtesy of the National Archives and
back thousands of years before the develop- Records Administration
ment of the roads. Evidence of human occu-
pation on the Plateau dates as far back as Paleo-Indian times, to approximately
8,000 B.C. Spear points made and used by ancient hunters following large
game animals have been recovered from lands managed today by Los Alamos
National Laboratory, as well as other locations on the Pajarito Plateau. The
ancestral Puebloan people developed a farming culture and built extensive vil-
lages throughout the many canyons and mesas. The density of archaeological
sites on the Plateau is the highest in the state of New Mexico.
The descendants of the Pueblo people had a diverse and flourishing
cultural tradition by the time the Spanish arrived. And they have survived
centuries of pressure from other groups while maintaining their true identity.
These are, of course, the Pueblo Indians of northern New Mexico, people
today that we know as friends, neighbors and co-workers.
Los Alamos is home to sev-

eral Lustron houses. After World
War II, the U.S. faced a severe
housing shortage. Carl Strand-
lund, a Swedish immigrant who
manufactured porcelain enamel
steel panels, came up with
the innovative idea of using
the panels to create prefabri-
cated “maintenance free” houses
Los Alamos Post Office made of steel. From 1948 to
1950, approximately 2,500 Lus-
tron pre-built homes were trucked to communities across the country. Approx-
imately 47 are individually listed in the National Register, and five states have
multiple listings of Lustrons. Because of their scarcity, the Southwest region of
the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed them on this year’s Eleven
Most Endangered List. Last weekend there was a two-day national conference
in Columbus, Ohio, that voted to list these, and there are six of these houses
on Fairway and 44th Street here in Los Alamos. The Historic Preservation
Commission is looking into listing them in the State and National Registers.
The 2000 Cerro Grande fire destroyed many homes, disrupted lives,
and took along with it numerous cultural resources. Among them were many
of the homesteader cabins that dotted the Pajarito Plateau. Today, only one
remains in section C2 of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Listed last year
at the New Mexico Register of Cultural Properties, it was built in 1920 by a
descendant of a soldier who served with Don Juan de Oñate around 1600.
The Historic Preservation Division hopes to work with the Lab to pre-
serve a portion of its Cold-War-era past, as it makes way for construction of
a new campus. The State Historic Preservation Officer Katherine Slick and
her staff toured the Lab earlier this month in light of plans to demolish the
Administration Building which was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Mer-
rill, currently the third largest architectural firm in the U.S. The firm was
recently commissioned to construct the freedom tower at the World Trade
Center site. The Historic Preservation Division is also encouraging the Los
Alamos National Laboratory to preserve archival photographs to document
the broad range of activities conducted at the Administration Building during
Preservation on the Pajarito Plateau 39
this period of significance and to document its original design, so it can be

compared to the as-built facility.
The Historic Preservation Division would like to see the Health Research
Laboratory retained, as well as landscape elements from the era that speak to
its past and current mission. The Division also hoped to be able to comment
on the overall master plan for the new campus at the Materials Science Labo-
ratory, so an interpretation of the Health Research Laboratory is included at
an appropriate location.
In conclusion, the Department of Cultural Affairs is the primary steward
of the State’s cultural patrimony. Through our Department’s Historic Preserva-
tion Division, we have a duty to protect historic buildings and sites for future
generations. Los Alamos was a stage for a pivotal period in United States his-
tory. The elements of New Mexico history and the impact of the Manhattan
Project on it should be preserved and made available for people to observe and
interpret for decades to come.
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER AND THE STATE

OF NEW MEXICO: A RECIPROCAL
RELATIONSHIP
Ferenc Szasz
Professor, Department of History, University of New Mexico
The sagas of famed atomic physicist J. Robert

Oppenheimer (JRO) and the state of New Mexico
have long been intertwined. Although the scientist
lived the majority of his life in New York, California,
and New Jersey, the Oppenheimer family leased
and subsequently purchased a second home in the
northern Pecos Valley during the late 1920s. A gen-
Ferenc Szasz eration after his death, Oppenheimer’s name still
echoes throughout the region. Los Alamos boasts an
Oppenheimer Avenue, and the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Commit-
tee sponsors a prestigious lecture series that brings speakers to the Hill from
around the world. In 1983, on the fortieth anniversary of the founding of
the community, the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) renamed their
scientific library the “J. Robert Oppenheimer Study Center” (currently the
third largest library in the state). Today the scientist’s son Peter lives quietly in
the Santa Fe region.10
10 With the end of the Cold War, the range of speakers at the lecture series now includes eminent
Russian scientists such as the former director of Arzamas-16. See the pamphlet Academician
Yuli Boriśovich Kharı́ton, July 1995 (Los Alamos, NM). Copy generously sent by Roger Meade,
Archivist of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; Los Alamos Monitor, 17 April 1983, as found
in Fern Lyon and Jacob Evans, Los Alamos: The First Forty Years (Los Alamos Historical Society,
Los Alamos, NM, 1984), p. 171.
40
J. Robert Oppenheimer and the State of New Mexico: A Reciprocal Relationship 41
Even in the early twenty-first century, the name “Oppenheimer” still calls
forth a flood of contradictory images. Throughout his 62 years, JRO wore a
number of hats. He was a child prodigy, a Harvard polymath, a pioneer in
the emerging field of theoretical physics, the man who put West Coast physics
on the world map, and the famed director of the secret Los Alamos Scientific
Laboratory (LASL) from 1943–1945. After the war, reporters termed him
“the father of the atomic bomb,” and for almost a decade, he carried the
mantle of public voice of nuclear wisdom. In 1947 he became director of
the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and, several years later, suffered
the indignity of a witch-hunt “trial” before the Personnel Security Board of the
United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Because of his well-known
left-wing connections in the 1930s, plus his recent opposition to the creation
of a U.S. hydrogen bomb, the AEC deprived him of his security clearance.
Nine years later, however, the AEC partially apologized by awarding him
its prestigious Fermi Medal. In 1994, 27 years after Oppenheimer’s death, a
former Soviet spymaster, Pavel Sudaplatov, publicly claimed that JRO (as well
as several others) had delivered atomic secrets to the Soviet Union during the
war. But Sudaplatov produced no documentary evidence to support the claim,
and the charges were hotly denied by both historians and JRO’s colleagues.11
A British commentator once compared JRO’s post-AEC hearings treatment
to that of the infamous Alfred Dreyfus affair, but the template reaches well
beyond the anti-semitic France of the 1890s. Indeed, the saga of his life seems
ripped from the pages of Sophocles or Aeschylus: J. Robert Oppenheimer as
tragic hero of the early nuclear age.12
11 Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness — A Soviet Spymaster
(Little Brown, Boston, MA, 1994). Time, 25 April 1994, 65–72; New York Times, 19 April
1944; Albuquerque Tribune, 18 April 1974.
12 For all his significance, Oppenheimer has been the subject of relatively few biographies. See
Peter Goodchild, J. Robert Oppenheimer: Shatterer of Worlds (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA,
1981); James W. Kunetka, Oppenheimer: The Years of Risk (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs,
NJ, 1982); and Jack Rummel, Robert Oppenheimer: Dark Prince (Facts on File, NY, 1992). The
latest is Jeremy Bernstein, Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, IL, 2004).
Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s long-awaited American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of
J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf, 2005). Robert F. Bacher’s brief pamphlet Robert Oppenheimer,
1904–1967 (Los Alamos Historical Society, Los Alamos, NM, 1972/1999) is still valuable.
The lengthy AEC hearings are available in In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript
of the Hearing Before Personnel Security Board and Texts of Principal Documents and Letters
(The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1971). JRO appears as a central figure in Herbert York, The
International figure though

he may have been, J. Robert
Oppenheimer also directly shaped
the course of New Mexico his-
tory. In fact, the JRO/New
Mexico stories overlapped in a
myriad of ways. Over the years,
Oppenheimer forged a number
of links to his adopted state.
Los Alamos Ranch Trading Post From his first visit to the Pecos
Courtesy of the Los Alamos Historical Society Forest Reserve in 1922, to the
purchase of a summer retreat in the upper Pecos Valley in 1929, to his director-
ship of the Lab during the war years, to his honorary degree from the University
of New Mexico in 1947, to his poignant last speech in Los Alamos in 1964,
the sagas of man and state have long been intertwined. In a strange sense, the
relationship proved reciprocal. The natural wonders of northern New Mexico
helped restore J. Robert Oppenheimer to both mental and physical health,
and his scientific management catapulted Los Alamos into a city that is now
recognized around the globe.
Born into a wealthy New York German-Jewish family on April 22, 1904,
young Robert’s first contact with New Mexico (like so many of his generation)
came because of illness. For all his brilliance, JRO suffered from a variety of
health problems. His parents cautioned his young friends to simply let him
alone during his periodic bouts of depression. His high school classmate and
long-term friend Francis Fergusson even claimed that JRO had once tried to
strangle him with a belt.
Shortly after he graduated from New York City’s famed Ethical Culture
School, JRO contracted a severe case of trench dysentery while on a miner-
alogical trip to the Herz Mountains of Germany. Too ill to attend Harvard that
fall as planned, he spent most of the year in the family apartment on Riverside
Drive, where he was largely confined to his room: the prescribed treatment of
Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco,
CA, 1976), Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert
Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (Henry Holt and Company, NY, 2002), and
S.S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of
the Scientist (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2000). The Preliminary Proceedings of
the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s symposium, Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, (25–26
June 2004), are available in typescript form from the Los Alamos Historical Society.
the day. This would have been hard on any teenager but for a budding genius
it approached the impossible. He increasingly began to behave in a sullen and
boorish manner. In desperation, his father begged Herbert W. Smith, his for-
mer English teacher, to take him West during the summer of 1922 to try to
restore his equilibrium. For almost two months the two rode through what
is now the Pecos Wilderness of northern New Mexico (then called the Pecos
Forest Reserve). A guest ranch in Cowles, New Mexico run by Winthrop and
Katherine Chaves Page served as their base.13
That Smith and Oppenheimer
ended up in the mountains of New
Mexico rather than those of Montana,
Wyoming, or Idaho may largely be
credited to fellow Ethical Culture stu-
dent and Albuquerque resident Francis
Fergusson. Fergusson belonged to one
of the state’s most eminent families.
His mother was Clara Huning, daugh-
ter of pioneer Fritz Huning, whose
Albuquerque mansion — the Hun-
ing Castle — once ranked among the
state’s most elegant homes. His father
was lawyer Harvey B. Fergusson, who
served in Washington, DC, as both Ter- Ruins of the old church at Jemez
ritorial delegate (from 1896 forward) Courtesy of the National Archives and Records
and, after statehood in 1912, as its Administration
first elected Congressman. Francis’ older brother, Harvey, later became a
respected Southwestern novelist, while his older sister Erna gained even greater
fame as the chief interpreter of the region to outsiders. Her Santa-Fe-based
Koshare Tour Services (1920–1927) and her books — especially Our South-
west (1940) — introduced thousands to the famed “three cultures” of the area.
Francis had attended Albuquerque schools, but he transferred to the Ethical
Culture School for his high school senior year to better prepare for admission
to an Ivy League university.
13 Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner (eds.), Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections
(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980), pp. 7–10. Charles Weiner interview with
Herbert W. Smith, 1 August 1974. Copy deposited at the American Institute of Physics, College
Park, MD.
Francis and Robert shared a schoolboy interest in poetry and drama and
surely it was he who urged the Oppenheimer family to consider the healing
charms of his home state. Francis obviously knew a good deal about the Koshare
Tours, where elegantly dressed young women, decked to the nines with Indian
jewelry, escorted La Fonda Hotel visitors to nearby Indian pueblos and ancient
Native and Hispanic sites. Through family connections, the Fergussons also
had links with the Chaves/Page clans.14 Moreover, ever since the late 19th
century, New Mexico had earned a deserved reputation as a place to regain
one’s health. During the pre-antibiotic days of the 1930s, the fledgling New
Mexico magazine frequently ran articles touting the state as a “land of almost
perpetual sunshine.”15
Oppenheimer’s first lengthy
visit to New Mexico in the sum-
mer of 1922 had a number of
consequences. First, Katherine
Chaves Page (a 28-year-old
upper-class Hispanic woman
blessed with great charm of
manner) welcomed the frail,
insecure boy into her family
circle. Women often responded
Mountain ranges around Los Alamos to JRO — on a variety of lev-
els — and some historians argue
that he had his first schoolboy crush on her.16 Although perhaps overstated,
Herbert W. Smith later told historian Alice Kimball Smith that when the
warm, aristocratic Chaves family embraced the frail Oppenheimer, he found
himself loved and admired “for the first time in his life.”17
Second, JRO’s long rides through the Pecos Forest Reserve — still one
of the most spectacular regions of the state — helped restore his mental and
14 “Erna Fergusson,” Albuquerque Review, 8 February 1962; Albuquerque Journal, 12 February

1962; ibid., 5 March 1954; ibid., 7 March 1965.
15 C.H. Gellenthien, M.D. with Anna Nolan Clark, “Climate for Health,” New Mexico 15
(September 1937) 12. See also Gellenthien with Clark, “Climate: The Magic Difference,” New
Mexico 15 (November 1937) 14–15, 41.
16 Goodchild, J.Robert Oppenheimer, pp. 14–15.
17 Quoted in Smith and Weiner, Letters and Recollections, p. 10.
physical balance. The young men camped amidst mountain forests of spruce,
pine, piñon, and aspen. They rode by 13,000-foot peaks, such as Santa Fe Baldy
and Pecos Baldy, that stretched well above timberline. They criss-crossed the
high meadows of Hamilton Mesa, Round Mountain, and Grady’s Mountain,
which dazzle the eye every summer with wild hollyhocks, red skyrockets, blue-
bells, jack-in-the-pulpits, purple asters, shooting stars, mountain pinks, and
bluewood violets. The area also abounds with lupine, blue bonnets, butter-
cups, dwarf lobelias, coreopsis, columbines, thistles, and evening primrose.
The forks of the Rio La Casa River contain 40’–60’ waterfalls, while bear,
mountain lion, deer, and elk all drink at sundown from the region’s scattered
lakes.18 As nature writer Lou Hernandez once observed, “In spring a visitor
can enjoy the feeling that he is the first to set foot in a virgin wilderness. . . ”19
Smith later reported that JRO relished the challenges of this mountain
experience and accepted his responsibilities like a mature adult. The trip must
have helped restore both body and soul for Oppenheimer entered Harvard in
the fall of 1923 and completed the rigorous four-year curriculum in only three
years. After graduation, he studied in Cambridge, England before earning his
Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Goettingen University in 1927, when he was
only twenty-three. His performance at the oral examination proved so dazzling
that his professor, James Franck, jested, “I got out of there just in time. He
was beginning to ask me questions.”
By switching to theoretical physics, young JRO finally discovered his
calling. After two years of further study, he accepted simultaneous appoint-
ments at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena. Alternating semesters at each university, during the
next decade Oppenheimer helped put West Coast physics on the international
scientific map. Initially apolitical, from the mid-1930s onward JRO increas-
ingly moved amidst radical left-wing circles. Whether he officially joined the
Communist Party remains an issue of some dispute.20
18 For descriptions of the region see Roy Allen Stamm, “Jaunt in July,” New Mexico (March
1937) 16–17, 34–35; “Trail Riders Plan Trek,” New Mexico Magazine 27 (March 1949) 26;
and Stamm, “The Peaks of the Pecos,” New Mexico Magazine 5 (September 1937) 22–23, ff.
19 Lou Hernandez, “High Country Waterfalls,” New Mexico Magazine 45 (August 1967) 3.
20 For a vigorous defense of his scientific accomplishments, see John S. Rigden, “J. Robert
Oppenheimer: Before the War,” Scientific American 273 (July 1995) 76–82. Historians Gregg
Herken and Barton Bernstein argue that he was a Communist; Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird
do not agree. See Charles Burress, “Expert: Oppenheimer was Communist,” Associated Press
Once back in the states for good, JRO’s father purchased a summer home
for his sons in the upper Pecos Valley in 1929. Thus, JRO and his younger
brother Frank (also a physicist) shared a New Mexico summer retreat to which
they would escape as often as possible. The Oppenheimer brothers grew to
love the region, and this also allowed Oppenheimer to maintain contact with
Katherine Chaves Page until her tragic murder in 1961. It is no exaggeration
to say that the foremost impact that New Mexico had on JRO was to restore
him back to health.
Oppenheimer’s 1922 trip to New Mexico also expanded his circle of
friends to include his first westerners. He and Smith renewed contact with
Francis Fergusson in Albuquerque, and there he met Harvey and Erna, as well
as their friend Paul Horgan. Horgan, who would later gain international fame
as both novelist and historian, formed a close relationship with JRO. He visited
the Oppenheimers’ Long Island summer home for extensive stays at least twice
and he and JRO (who at that time voiced serious literary aspirations) enjoyed
themselves immensely. On one visit, the two were out sailing on JRO’s sloop the
Trimethy and got caught in a rip tide that carried them far out to sea. When
they failed to return on time, Oppenheimer’s father dispatched the family
yacht for a search mission. In a later interview, Horgan termed the youthful
Fergusson–Oppenheimer–Horgan relationship a “pigmy triumvirate.” He also
confessed that Oppenheimer was the most brilliant person he had ever met.
In retrospect, Horgan regretted that their careers had so diverged. Although
Horgan taught on the faculty at Wesleyan and Fergusson became a Professor
of Literature at Princeton (with JRO nearby), the three seldom saw much of
one another.21
Perhaps the most remarkable New Mexico friendship that JRO forged,
however, came during the summer of 1937. Exhausted from his West Coast
teaching, he had returned to the Pecos region for an extended vacation. While
horseback riding through the Valle Grande area, he stopped at Edith Warner’s
modest tea room on the west side of the Rio Grande, near the lone, wooden
Otowi Bridge crossing. The daughter of a Pennsylvania Baptist minister, the
article in the Albuquerque Tribune, 24 April 2004. Herken makes his case in Brotherhood of
the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward
Teller (Henry Holt and Co., NY, 2002), especially pp. 43–62.
21 Smith and Weiner, Oppenheimer, p. 8. Interview with Paul Horgan by Alice Kimball Smith,
3 March 1976, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA;
interview with Francis Fergusson, 21 April 1976, ibid.
quasi-mystical Warner had es-

caped to New Mexico to write
essays and eke out a living in
the shadow of San Ildefonso
Pueblo. From a rented adobe
home on Pueblo land, she served
as the Otowi “station agent” for
the narrow-gauge Denver and
Rio Grande Western Railroad
(the Chili Line). Translated, this
meant that the headmaster of the Edith Warner’s house
Los Alamos Ranch School, A.J. Connell, had hired her to watch over the exten-
sive Ranch School supplies and luggage until a truck could collect the goods
on its thrice-weekly, three-and-a-half-hour journey up the lone dirt road to
the Hill. The Chili Line railway storage facility consisted of a boxcar.
In addition, Warner operated a small tea shop from her home where
she sold gasoline, ice, candy, and sandwiches to the steady stream of tourists
who ventured from Santa Fe to the Frijoles Canyon Indian ruins (now the
Bandelier National Monument). Warner’s pleasant manner, plus her famed
recipe for chocolate cake, charmed Oppenheimer, and he never forgot her.
This chance meeting bore fruit six years later. By early 1943, the Chili
Line had gone bankrupt, the Los Alamos Ranch School had been taken over
by the federal government, and wartime travel restrictions had cut the Santa
Fe tourist trade to a trickle. Thus, Warner faced genuine destitution. In a
gesture of great magnanimity, JRO, now director of the secret laboratory,
Site Y, encouraged her to establish a “reservations only” restaurant to serve
special meals — up to ten people at a time — to a select clientele. Because
of security concerns, the clientele consisted exclusively of the Los Alamos
scientists and their wives.
Both sides benefited from this experience. Hill residents relished the
fifteen-mile drive at sunset down to her home by the Rio Grande “where
the river makes a noise.” They especially enjoyed the simple meals that she
prepared on her wood-burning stove for — as she phrased it — her “hungry
scientists.” Since she and her San Ildefonso partner Tilano drew most of the
produce from their extensive garden, the dinners abounded with five kinds of
squash, beans, raspberries, and fresh corn. For all this, she charged only two
dollars per person and refused all tips. As this modest sum barely enabled her
to cover expenses, several Hill wives helped sell her excess produce to their
neighbors.22
Dining on Native American foods
before an open fire in a home without tele-
phone or electricity charmed the LASL scien-
tists. The tranquil setting seemed to provide
needed respite from their frenzied pace of
life on the Hill. Their regular custom not
only allowed Warner to survive the lean war
years, it also enabled her to forge friendships
with some of the finest minds of the day. She
became especially close to Alice Kimball and
Cyril Smith, Carson and Kay Mark, Edward
and MiciTeller, Niels Bohr, Stan and François
Ulam, and Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer.
(Tilano always referred to the Laboratory
Edith Warner director as “Mr. Op.”) Fittingly, it was Kitty
Courtesy of the Los Alamos Historical Oppenheimer who drove down to inform her
Society of the bombing of Hiroshima. Along the way,
Warner alerted the scientists and their wives
to San Ildefonso traditions, and cautioned them to avoid certain sacred areas
when they hiked throughout the region.23
Numerous Los Alamos memoirs recall the charm of dining at Edith
Warner’s home. Reservations became highly sought after as Hill residents rel-
ished the good food and quiet conversations. Eventually the steady demand
overburdened the frail Warner and she had to reduce her meal offerings from
five days a week to three. But she always found time to feed Robert and Kitty
Oppenheimer whenever they asked.
After the war, when a new metal bridge across the Rio Grande threatened
to disrupt Edith and Tilano’s tranquil lifestyle, Los Alamos scientists joined
22 Bernice Brode, Tales of Los Alamos: Life on the Mesa, 1943–1945 (Los Alamos Historical
Society, Los Alamos, NM, 1997), pp. 120–128.
23 Interview with Alice Kimball Smith by Helen Homans Gilbert, at Radcliffe College (1987).
Copy supplied by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Schlesinger Library, Cambridge,
MA, p. 63; 1945 Christmas Letter, Edith Warner Manuscripts, Angelico Chavez Historical
Library, Santa Fe, NM.
with San Ildefonso builders to erect a new adobe house at a more distant
location. The building stands today.
Edith Warner did not long survive the war. In spite of treatment at
Los Alamos, she died of cancer in 1951. But her story has evolved into a
New Mexico legend, one that drew on Hispanic, Native, and Anglo-American
traditions. In 1951, sensing that the end was near, she ordered Tilano two years’
supply of blue jeans from Montgomery Ward. He died precisely two years later.
Whether their relationship was platonic or physical has never been clear, but
everyone agrees that it was deep and enduring. A modern observer has called
the saga of Edith and Tilano “one of the great love stories of all time.”24
Taos novelist Frank Waters fictionalized this story in his clumsy The
Woman at Otowi Crossing (1966).25 But Warner found her Boswell in Peggy
Pond Church’s The House at Otowi Bridge (1959), a southwestern classic that
has never gone out of print.26
Oppenheimer’s role in this myth has never been given proper credit. Yet
it was his chance encounter with Warner during the summer of 1937 that laid
the groundwork for the emergence of a New Mexico legend. On a deeper level,
Warner’s nourishing meals of traditional Native foods provided yet another
way by which the charm of New Mexico allowed the pressured scientists to
restore their own delicate balance — not just Oppenheimer this time but
scores of others as well. As Cyril Smith once remarked to his wife Alice, “You
can’t possibly talk about Los Alamos without her.”27
The official headquarters of the Manhattan Engineering District (or
“Manhattan Project,” the cover name for the American effort to build an
atomic bomb), lay initially on the 67th floor of the Empire State Building, and,
later, in the new War Building in Washington, DC. But the major scientific
and technological work took place at dozens of locations scattered across the
nation. Military laboratories and major universities such as the University
of California, Columbia, the University of Chicago, MIT, the University of
Minnesota, and the University of Rochester all played crucial roles. When
24 Patrick Burns (ed.), In the Shadow of Los Alamos: Selected Writings of Edith Warner (University
of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM, 2001), p. 31.
25 Frank Waters, The Woman at Otowi Crossing (Swallow Press, Inc., Chicago, IL, 1966).
26 Peggy Pond Church, The House at Otowi Bridge: The Story of Edith Warner and Los Alamos
(University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM, 1959/1960).
27 Alice Kimball Smith interview.
Major General Leslie R. Groves assumed overall command of this program on

September 12, 1942, he tried to bring order to this diffuse enterprise. Groves
insisted that all Project activities be compressed to a single goal: to create a
combat-ready atomic weapon in the shortest possible time.28
From the onset, Groves insisted on
absolute secrecy. He did so for two reasons.
First, obviously, was to stem any scientific
or technical leaks to the Axis powers (or to
the Soviets, who were similarly excluded);
second was to increase the absolute shock
value whenever the weapon first saw com-
bat use. Thus, Groves insisted on a pol-
icy of strict compartmentalization: that
is, a person should know only enough to
perform his or her specific assignment.
Only a handful of people knew the overall
purpose of the Manhattan Project. Most
General Leslie R. Groves workers had no idea what the person on
the hall above them was working on. Until
Hiroshima, many Los Alamos wives did not know what their husbands were
engaged in. Even Groves’ wife and two children remained completely in
the dark.
But numerous scientists protested. Several said they would not move to
Los Alamos if they could not tell their wives everything (Groves relented).
Others argued that since the many problems they faced were so interrelated,
the policy of compartmentalization would actually delay the final outcome.
Thus, they insisted that the Manhattan Project create a spot where all issues
could be discussed in a no-holds-barred scientific atmosphere.
Groves bent with the prevailing winds and agreed to set up such a venue.
But the requirements were strict: the new location had to be isolated from
major urban centers, easily protected by Army security forces, convenient to
major transportation networks, and (preferably) already on federally-owned
land so as to minimize the difficulties of the appropriation of property.29
28 Robert S. Norris, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project’s Indis-
pensable Man (Steerforth Press, South Royalton, VT, 2002) is a first-rate biography.
29 LASL NEWS, 1 January 1963, 13.
Over the objection of many of his advisors, Groves selected JRO to head
this new installation. Opponents pointed to Oppenheimer’s well-known radi-
cal past but Groves argued that Oppenheimer knew so much about the Project
anyway that it would be far better to have him at Los Alamos under constant
surveillance. Moreover, he sensed that Oppenheimer’s relentless ambition for
fame would cause him to drop all previous radical contacts.30
Although Groves would later claim that he knew well the region of north-
ern New Mexico from his time spent in Arizona, it was clearly Oppenheimer
who alerted him to the possibility of New Mexico as a spot for the proposed
Site Y. (A California venue had already been rejected as not sufficiently iso-
lated.) In the fall of 1942, JRO and Groves seriously explored two New Mexico
locations. The first was Jemez Springs, but Groves felt that the cliffs bordering
the town might hamper future expansion, while JRO argued that they would
stifle creativity by making the scientists claustrophobic.
The second choice lay with the nearby Los Alamos Ranch School, which
by 1942 had fallen on hard times. Many of the staff members had departed
for the military, and student enrollment suffered accordingly.31 One often
reads that JRO chose the location because he had graduated from the Ranch
School — even Paul Horgan held this view — but this is not so. JRO knew
the region only through horseback visits from his Pecos Valley home.
Groves responded favorably.
He liked the fact that Los Alamos
could be approached only by a
single, easily guarded dirt road,
and he deemed the Hill suffi-
ciently isolated from mainstream
American life. Initially the modest
Ranch School buildings seemed
appropriate to house the estimated
100 scientists and their fami-
lies needed to complete the task. Typical muddy road in Los Alamos, NM
30 Norris, Racing for the Bomb, p. 242.

31 For a superb memoir of life at the school, see John D. Wirth and Linda Harvey Alridrich, Los
Alamos: The Ranch School Years, 1917–1943 (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque,
NM, 2003). See also Roland A. Pettitt, Los Alamos Before the Dawn (Pajarito Publications, Los
Alamos, NM, 1972), pp. 42–43.
Although the Ranch School, the nearby Anchor Ranch, and the properties of
scores of Hispanic ranchers would have to be appropriated, much of the land
lay in Forest Service hands. Oppenheimer also argued that the breathtaking
views from the mesas would spur scientific creativity. Both were proven cor-
rect. With numerous MP’s, many on horseback, a team of guard dogs (the
K-9 Squad), and scattered G-2 (Army Intelligence) agents in Albuquerque
and Santa Fe, Los Alamos proved relatively easy to secure from outsiders.
And numerous scientists recalled the spectacular environment as the lynch-
pin of their experience. As metallurgist Cyril Smith observed, “to my mind
the landscape is as much a part of the project as Groves’ management. The
environment has an immense effect, I think, on one’s general state of mind.
Weekend hikes made it possible for us to maintain this intense level of work
during the war.”32
Thus on December 7, 1942, Ranch School headmaster A.J. Connell,
who had long seen the handwriting on the wall, received official notice that
the Federal government planned to confiscate the Ranch School properties
for the war effort. After considerable bickering as to the date of transfer, the
Army agreed that the four seniors could take accelerated classes and gradu-
ate on January 21, 1943. Accordingly, the four received their diplomas in a
formal graduation ceremony and departed, respectively, for Cornell, Harvard,
Stanford, and the Newark College of Engineering.33 The dust had not set-
tled before the Army arrived en masse to create the top-secret Site Y. Without
JRO’s deep affection for northern New Mexico, the nation’s premier weapons
laboratory would not be located where it is today.
Oppenheimer’s major impact on the state of New Mexico, of course,
lay with his role as director of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory from
1943–1945. One of the first decisions he made in early 1943 involved trees.
Contractors’ bulldozers had begun to level the terrain for various buildings but
he stopped this immediately, insisting that every possible tree remain in place.
This proved among the first of thousands of decisions in what became nothing
less than an administrative miracle. JRO’s fair and balanced decision-making
32 Interview by author with Alice and Cyril Smith (telephone); copy of transcript in Los Alamos
National Laboratory Archives.
33 Los Alamos Monitor 50th Anniversary Guide, Sunday, 28 March 1999, 6. The majority of
the text for this special edition came from Marjory Bell Chambers, “Technically Sweet Los
Alamos: The Development of a Federally Sponsored Scientific Community”, unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, University of New Mexico (1974).
proved even more remarkable when one realizes that he had had no previous
administrative experience. (He had never even served as head of a university
physics department.)
The issues he dealt with
ranged from the mundane to the
cosmic. Because of the isolation
and relatively primitive living con-
ditions, he spent countless hours
assuring scientists — and especially
their wives — that the ultimate
goal was a worthy one and that
the harsh circumstances were only
temporary.34 When Edward Teller “Remote Handling” at Los Alamos
refused to cooperate, JRO wisely Courtesy of the Los Alamos Historical Society
gave him his own Group to head. Along the way he composed a little prayer:
“May the Lord preserve us from the enemy without and the Hungarians
within.”35
The ever-present Army security measures proved a constant annoyance.
All incoming and outgoing mail passed under censors’ eyes, state driver’s
licenses carried numbers rather than names, and the numerous babies were
registered as born at Box 1663, Santa Fe, NM. Cameras were discouraged
and diaries were forbidden. Everyone visiting Santa Fe shops and museums
had instructions not to speak to people more than necessary. When Hill wives
dined at the La Fonda Hotel for lunch, they were well aware that they remained
under constant G-2 surveillance.36 One final example: the Girl Scouts formed
a chapter but the troop had to pretend to be in Santa Fe (as Los Alamos did not
officially exist). Moreover, all girls who had scientist fathers were instructed to
register under fake names, lest spies discover where their fathers were located.37
34 John Marble, “First Medical Staff Couldn’t Keep Up . . . ,” Los Alamos Monitor 50th Anniversary
Guide, Sunday, 28 March 1999, 22.
35 Charles L. Crutchfield, “The Robert Oppenheimer I Knew,” in Behind Tall Fences: Stories
and Experiences About Los Alamos at its Beginning (Los Alamos Historical Society, Los Alamos,
NM, 1996), p. 173. The best book on the Manhattan Project remains Richard Rhodes, The
Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster, NY, 1986). See also the official AEC history,
Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939/1946 (The Pennsylvania
State University Press, University Park, PA, 1962).
36 Gilbert interview with Alice Kimball Smith.
37 Albuquerque Journal, 3 April 1965.
The technical and scientific dilemmas that Oppenheimer faced, of

course, dwarfed all the other problems combined. From 1943–1945
Manhattan Project scientists stood at the very edge of human knowledge.
This proved true for every step of the process. On a technical level, skilled
machinists had to devise delicate beryllium-copper tools to drill high explo-
sives, lest a steel tool accidentally spark and send the building up in flames.
Metallurgists dealing with plutonium had no precedent to guide them as they
painstakingly shaped the man-made radioactive element into hemispheres for
theTrinity/Nagasaki weapons. Among JRO’s most creative administrative deci-
sions came with his plan to restructure the entire laboratory to focus on the
implosion weapon when it became clear that plutonium could not be used in
the planned uranium-235 gun-type bomb.38
Along with administrative and technical questions, JRO faced a number
of cosmic questions as well. Should the U-235 weapon be dropped in combat
without any prior field test? Could a “Super” or hydrogen weapon — hundreds
of times more powerful — be created along with a fission bomb? How could
the laboratory best defend its workers against potential radiation dangers? And,
the ultimate question: could a nuclear bomb somehow ignite the atmosphere
and destroy all life on earth? When Los Alamos historian David Hawkins first
raised this last question with Edward Teller, Teller responded, with his usual dry
wit: “Oh, David, there are worse things that could happen.”39 Oppenheimer
had a role in virtually every LASL decision, large or small.
But Los Alamos allowed time for play as well as work. The lab closed
down on Sundays and the scientists took advantage of the time off to hike the
extensive mountains of the region. They visited the ruins of Frijoles Cañon so
often that it became virtually their private playground. In winter they skated
Ashley Pond and skied the nearby mountains slopes. Oppenheimer and his
wife Kitty took several two-day horseback rides across the Rio Grande to their
38 See Lillian Hoddeson, Paul W. Henriksen, Roger A. Meade, and Catherine Westfall, Crit-
ical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993).
39 Terry L. Rosen, The Atomic City: A Firsthand Account by a Son of Los Alamos (Sunbelt Eakin,
Austin, TX, 2002), quoted p. 8; on Teller, see Edward Teller with Judith Shoolery, Memoirs: A
Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (Perseus, Cambridge, MA, 2001), and Peter
Goodchild, Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2004).
Pecos home, much to the dismay of the FBI agents who had to accompany
them. He usually rode a horse named “Crisis,” so feisty that he alone could
handle it.
All the Los Alamos memoirs laud Oppenheimer’s administrative skills.
Rather than govern from an office desk, JRO spent his time constantly attend-
ing meetings and visiting laboratories. He seemed to know a bit about every
problem on hand. People especially remembered his consideration and even-
handedness. For example, in one instance he went out of his way to thank
the MP’s for keeping the project safe. In another case, when he had to choose
between two equally qualified scientists for a key position, he simply asked
them to draw straws. As Project veteran Jo Ann Foley once observed, JRO
should get an award for “cross-cultural communication. He kept everybody
on an even keel, even the teenagers.”40
His administrative reputation has not faded with time. As Atomic Energy
Commission head Glenn T. Seaborg observed in 1965, to a large extent “the
greatness [of Los Alamos] lay in Robert Oppenheimer.”41 British Mission
member James Tuck remained convinced that “a lesser man could not have
done it.” As another Los Alamos alumnus observed, “The work certainly would
have been completed without Oppenheimer, but it wouldn’t have been done
so soon. He was very close to being indispensable. You think someone else
might have come along — but you never know.”42
Oppenheimer made thousands of decisions that affected New Mexico,
but few proved more important than his acceptance of the plan to test the
world’s first atomic weapon at Trinity Site, about 35 miles east of Socorro. He
even chose the name “Trinity” for the spot, and today “Trinity Site” appears
on most state maps. What Oppenheimer meant by this term has never been
40 Cited in Ellen D. McGehee, “The Women of Project Y: Working at the Birthplace of the
Bomb, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1942–1946,” MA thesis in history, University of New Mexico
(2004), p. 106, and “J. Robert Oppenheimer: As Los Alamos Knew Him,” The Atom (March
1967) 2.
41 Glenn T. Seaborg, “Los Alamos: 25 Years in the Service of Science and the Nation,” The Atom
5 (March 1965) 5.
42 Tuck is quoted in Noel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer (Simon & Schuster, NY,
1968), p. 187; unnamed scientist quoted in Lincoln Barnett, “J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Life
27 (10 October 1949) 133.
clear. Some have suggested that he drew the name from a John Donne poem
he had just read that contained the lines:
“Batter my heart
Three person’d God. . . ”
Los Alamos historian Marjorie Bell Chambers, however, has offered another
explanation. She argues that the reference to Trinity has Hindu rather than
Christian roots. In this sense, the term refers to that which is, is destroyed, and
is revived again.43 The issue will probably never be resolved. When I posed
this question to Frank Oppenheimer in the early 1980s, he confessed that he
simply did not know.
In the tense hours before the Trinity test on Monday, July 16, 1945,
Oppenheimer seemed on the verge of collapse. Gaunt and exhausted, he held
onto a pole to steady himself as the Trinity countdown approached zero. Dur-
ing the final seconds, he hardly breathed.44 When the huge ball of fire rose
40,000 feet in the air (proving that the scientists’ theories had been correct)
he confessed to a colleague: “My confidence in the human mind is somewhat
restored.” To his brother Frank he simply said, “It worked.”45 Three weeks
later, on August 6 and August 9, the specially modified B-29s Enola Gay and
Bock’s Car dropped their respective weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On August 14, Japan surrendered. Although the atomic bombs may not have
won the war, they certainly ended it. Under Oppenheimer’s direction, the Los
Alamos scientists had been given an impossible assignment. And they delivered.
Exhausted by his ordeal, JRO told Groves that he hoped to resign as
soon as possible. On October 16, 1945, his last day as director, JRO spoke to
virtually the entire Los Alamos community in a gigantic outdoor ceremony.
General Groves presented a certificate of appreciation from the Secretary of
War, which JRO accepted on behalf of the Laboratory with a brief speech. In
it he noted:
If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring
world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will
43 Marjorie Bell Chambers, “Technically sweet Los Alamos: The development of a federally
sponsored scientific community,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico (1974).
44 General T.E. Farrell’s account in Donald Porter Geddes (ed.), The Atomic Age Opens (Pocket
Books, NY, 1945), p. 32.
45 For the saga of this event, see Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of
the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945 (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque,
NM, 1984/1995).
come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.
The peoples of the world must unite, or they will perish.46
Three weeks later, on November 5, 1945, he gave his final Los Alamos speech
to the approximately 500 members of the newly formed Association of Los
Alamos Scientists (ALAS). Since he had officially turned the Laboratory over
to his successor, Naval Commander Norris Bradbury, he felt a little more free
to express his thoughts. Emphasizing both the “peril” and “hope” of atomic
energy, he pleaded for scientific openness as the key to world unity. It remains
one his best-remembered addresses.47
Over the years, many of JRO’s scientific colleagues have recorded their
impressions of his wartime leadership of the Laboratory. Charles Crutchfield
noted that at the start, Oppenheimer seemed to view the Manhattan Project
with virtual indifference. He considered it as a purely a scientific inquiry to see if
the Allies could crack the nuclear secrets of nature. (If they could not, of course,
then neither could the Germans.) But as time wore on, Oppenheimer became
more emotionally involved until by 1945 he had staked everything he had on
the successful outcome of the Trinity test.48 Scientist Louis Rosen recalled his
former director as a man with the brain of an Einstein and the soul of poet.49
Long-term assistant John Man-
ley provided yet another perspective
on his leadership during those years
when he highlighted JRO’s great flair
for the dramatic. When JRO began
recruiting scientists to come to Los
Alamos, it almost seemed as if he
were casting them as actors in a
play. On virtually every major occa-
sion, he came up with a poignant, Trinity Site Headquarters
quotable phrase. For example, when
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, Oppenheimer
quoted from the Hindu sacred writings, the Bhagavad-Gita: “Man is a creature
46 Smith and Weiner, Letters and Recollections, pp. 310–311.

47 ibid., pp. 315–325.
48 Crutchfield, “Oppenheimer,” in Behind Tall Fences, pp. 172–176.
49 Rosen, The Atomic City, p. 45.
whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.”50 After the Trinity test, he
delivered an even-more famous quotation from the same source: “I am become
death, the shatterer of worlds.” (He admired this skill in others, as well. He
later told the daughter of Trinity Site Director Kenneth T. Bainbridge that her
father’s comment — “Now we’re all sons of bitches” — was the best thing ever
said at Trinity.51 )
This propensity for delivering the on-target, dramatic phrase became a
central part of his post-war persona. On August 17, 1945 he said, “A scientist
cannot hold back progress because of fears of what the world will do with his
discoveries.”52 When he met President Harry Truman, he said he had “blood
on his hands.” Later he achieved notoriety for the remark: “In some sort of
crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extin-
guish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot
lose.” (Truman was not pleased at such public displays of guilt, and suppos-
edly refused to ever see him again.) In March 1946, JRO advised University of
Pennsylvania students that because nuclear war had become “unendurable,”
the atomic bombs would produce a “better world.”53 In another speech he
noted that the “book of the past is closed and one has a fresh page to write
on.”54 When asked to characterize his position as director of the Institute for
Advanced Study, he described himself as simply an “academic innkeeper.” On
another occasion, he described the issue of lingering radioactivity in the soil as
“a nontrivial problem.” After the war he honed this ability into a fine art. In
1949 he noted, “As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what
they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science
will never regress.” In 1953 he described the world situation as: “We may be
likened to two scorpions in a battle, each capable of killing the other but only
at the risk of his own life.” Three years later he observed, “In a free world, if
50 FDR Memorial Address, Box 262, J. Robert Oppenheimer Papers, Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
51 Quoted in Robert V. Pound’s obituary of Kenneth Thompkins Bainbridge, Physics Today
(January 1997) 81.
52 Santa Fe New Mexican, 17 August 1945, as found in War Records Library Collection, Scrap-
book 71, New Mexico State Records Center and Archive, Santa Fe, NM.
53 Truman statement, misquoted in Goodchild, J. Robert Oppenheimer, p. 174; Santa Fe
New Mexican, 27 March 1946, Scrapbook 71, New Mexico State Records and Archive Center,
Sante Fe, NM.
54 JRO, untitled tape recording, c. 1947, Audio Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
it is to remain free, we must maintain, with our lives if need be yet surely by
our lives, the opportunity for a man to learn anything.” On Einstein’s death
in 1955 he said, “Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a
man.” When he accepted the AEC award from Lyndon Johnson in 1963, he
wryly noted, “I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it may have taken
some charity and some courage for you to make this award today.” A number
of his sayings have virtually entered the language.55
Although JRO may have lacked a sense of humor, he compensated for
it by his flair for the piercing bon mot. As reporter Eric Sevareid observed in
1963, he was a “scientist who wrote like a poet and speaks like a prophet.”56
And this largely began with his years as LASL director.
In his autobiography, General Groves
suggested that at war’s end he was eager
to see JRO leave LASL for two rea-
sons. First, everything afterwards would be
anti-climatic for him and second, Groves
expressed concern over the ever-present
problem of JRO’s radical past.57 But the
exhausted Oppenheimer was more than
ready to return to academic life at Caltech,
which eagerly welcomed him back. To his
dismay, he found this impossible. During
1947, for example, he flew from California
to Washington fifteen times. He spent end-
less hours writing the Acheson–Lilienthal Life magazine, October 1949
report — the basis for the (failed) Baruch
Plan presented to the United Nations in 1946. This proposal embodied
America’s attempt to avoid an arms race by creating an International Atomic
55 J.K. McCaffery video interview with JRO, Audio Division, Library of Congress, Washington,
DC. Many Oppenheimer quotations may be found on http://www.quotations.com and in
Clifton Fadiman (ed.), The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (Little, Brown and Company, Boston,
MA, 1985), p. 435. Most compilations of twentieth-century quotations include one or more
of his observations, and, incidentally, they rarely cite the same ones.
56 Eric Sevareid interview with JRO, 2 December 1963, Oppenheimer Papers, Manuscript
Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. See also, “The Oppenheimer Years, 1943–
1945,” Los Alamos Science 4 (Winter/Spring 1983) 6–25.
57 Norris, Racing for the Bomb, p. 446.
Energy Committee under UN auspices. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union

refused to cooperate. Congress also called on JRO on numerous occasions.
From director of an obscure secret laboratory in northern New Mexico,
Oppenheimer had suddenly assumed the mantle of public spokesman on issues
of nuclear science and government.
With the possible exception of Albert Einstein, JRO emerged in the
post-war period as the world’s most highly profiled scientist. His distinctive
porkpie hat — adopted at Los Alamos because Groves felt he stood out too
prominently wearing his traditional cowboy hat — appeared without caption
on the cover of the inaugural issue of Physics Today. Life also put him on the
cover of its October 1949 issue with the sidebar: “No. 1 Thinker on Atomic
Energy.”
Given the increased public demands, Oppenheimer made relatively few
official trips back to New Mexico after 1945. He did visit the Hill in August
of 1946 for a six-day conference on nuclear physics and again the next year to
report (favorably) on the status of the now-permanent, Bradbury-run labora-
tory. We know that he stayed several days with his former secretary Dorothy
McKibbin during the time, but his later visits to the state all remain undoc-
umented. In 1947 he assumed the position of Director of the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton, and in the mid-1950s he and Kitty purchased
another summer house in the Virgin Islands. This island home, which allowed
him to indulge his passion for sailing, seems to have replaced the Pecos valley
cabin as his primary retreat. Although he must have visited his brother Frank’s
Pagosa Springs, Colorado ranch on occasion, JRO did not make another offi-
cial public visit to New Mexico until May of 1964.
The fledgling University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, however, had
attempted to entice him back in 1947, but without success. From the onset, the
academic “manager” of LASL had been the University of California, Berkeley,
which oversaw all equipment purchases for the Manhattan Project years. At
the dawn of the twenty-first century, with the university LANL contract now
open to bids, some have wondered why Groves did not consider the much
closer University of New Mexico in Albuquerque for this assignment. One
reason for the Berkeley choice surely lay with JRO’s long-term links to the
school, but another lay with the respective sizes of the two institutions in the
1940s. The University of New Mexico then housed fewer than 100 faculty and
under 1,500 students. The 350 graduates who donned caps and gowns in 1947
represented the largest graduating class in the school’s 58-year history. (That
same year, UNM awarded its first two Ph.D.’s.)58 From a security point of
view, any attempt to funnel gigantic amounts of scientific equipment through
UNM in the 1940s would have instantly raised eyebrows. Only an institution
the size of Berkeley could have served as an appropriate cover. Indeed, the first
Berkeley contract, signed April 20, 1943 and backdated to the first of January,
spoke of 250 workers and 7.5 million dollars in expenses.59 The University of
California has successfully managed Los Alamos for over sixty years.
But post-war UNM had its eyes fixed firmly on the future, and in the
spring of 1947, President J.P. Wernette wrote JRO to ask him if he could
come to Albuquerque to speak at commencement and also receive an honorary
degree. Unfortunately, the invitation was delayed in the mails and by the time
it arrived, Oppenheimer had made other plans. Still, as he wrote Wernette,
“[New Mexico] is almost a home state to me for many reasons. . . ”60
Although disappointed the UNM faculty voted to award him the degree
in absentia. Accordingly, Wernette read the following at commencement exer-
cises in Zimmerman Stadium on Saturday, June 7, 1947:
J. Robert Oppenheimer, inspiring teacher, brilliant theorist in contempo-

rary physics, former director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, leader in
the development of atomic energy, scientific statesman, determined to make
this fabulous power serve the peacetime needs of humanity. Upon the rec-
ommendation of the Faculty of the University and by vote of the Regents, I
confer upon him, in absentia, the honorary degree of Doctor of Science.61
The last thirteen years of Oppenheimer’s life, 1954–1967, were not espe-
cially pleasant. The publicity surrounding the 1954 AEC hearings, which
sullied his reputation, aged him terribly, and seemingly broke his heart. It
also made him persona non grata in many official circles. A 1955 proffered
invitation to speak at the University of Washington was hastily withdrawn,
although he did speak to the nearby University of Oregon in Eugene shortly
58 Albuquerque, Journal 8 June 1947.

59 Charmain Schaller, “General Groves Demanded a Miracle — And Got It,” Los Alamos Monitor
50th Anniversary Guide, Sunday, 28 March 1999, 7.
60 Wernette to JRO, 11 June 1947, Box 227, Oppenheimer Papers, Manuscript Collection,
Library of Congress, Washington, DC; JRO to Wernette, ibid.
61 Albuquerque Journal, 8 June 1947.
afterwards. Nuclear politics were so sensitive that Lab director Norris Bradbury
could not extend him an official invitation to return to the Hill until after
JRO had received the AEC Fermi Award in 1963. With this, Oppenheimer
became somewhat “rehabilitated,” and Bradbury officially invited him back
for a public talk. Oppenheimer chose the subject “Niels Bohr and Atomic
Weapons.”62
On their two-day visit to Los Alamos in mid-May of 1964, Kitty and
Robert Oppenheimer received the red carpet treatment. They were treated
to a special screening of the documentary film “Ten Seconds that Shook the
World,” and took a private tour of the newly erected LASL Museum. When
JRO sat again in his old director’s chair — now a museum exhibit — he
quipped to Bradbury that it was “still very hard.”63
The turnout for his talk proved overwhelming. Although absent from
the Hill for almost fifteen years, a thousand people filled the Civic Auditorium
that Monday night. The standing ovations that he received at both start and
finish brought tears to his eyes. Norris Bradbury introduced him as “Mr. Los
Alamos.”
During his speech, he emphasized the need for an “open world” of free
interchange of scientific information. In passing, he observed that the leaders
of the Manhattan Project were “not free of misgivings. . . We were troubled
about what we were up to.” Several reporters rushed up afterwards but he
refused to respond to any questions. All he would say was: “I love my country,
if that’s what you want to know.”64
When Oppenheimer died on February 18, 1967, after months of battling
throat cancer, accolades poured in from around the world. Among the most
insightful was that of Norris Bradbury. Said his successor: “His stamp upon
the character of Los Alamos was profound and permanent; his impression
upon those who knew him was no less so. . . Such men are incredibly rare.”65
62 Jane A. Sanders, “The University of Washington and the Controversy over J. Robert
Oppenheimer,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 70 (January 1979) 8–19; “Oppenheimer to Speak
Here,” The Atom (April 1964) 1.
63 “Los Alamos Revisited,” The Atom (June 1964) 11–13; quotation on p. 12.
64 Albuquerque Journal, 19 May 1964. A version of the speech appeared in the New York Review
of Books, 17 December 1964, 6–8.
65 “J. Robert Oppenheimer,” The Atom (March 1967) 4.
The links between J. Robert Oppenheimer and the state of New Mexico
stretched over four and a half decades, and in many ways they proved recip-
rocal. The magnificent silences of the Pecos Forest Reserve helped restore
Oppenheimer’s physical and psychic balance and he developed a lifelong affec-
tion for the state. In a sense, he must have linked New Mexico with the idea
of renewed health. His consideration for the woman at the Otowi Bridge,
whom he met on a 1937 horseback ride, not only allowed Edith Warner to
survive the war economically, it also enabled his fellow LASL scientists to
retain their delicate mental balance as well. It is no exaggeration to say that
Oppenheimer provided the canvas on which Peggy Pond Church would later
create an authentic New Mexico legend. JRO’s acquaintance with the Los
Alamos Ranch School helped convince General Groves to locate Site Y on the
Pajarito Plateau. And his directorship of Los Alamos during the war years still
serves as the template for effective scientific management.
In 1948, the AEC officially
decided to keep the Los Alamos
National Laboratory where it was
and inaugurated a 100-million-
dollar rebuilding program. In
1949, Los Alamos became a sep-
arate county. Five years later, the
town ranked as the eighth largest
city in the state with over 12,000
in population. By the mid 1950s,
Passage from A to B building
it represented a 250-million-dollar Courtesy of the Los Alamos Historical Society
federal investment. In 2004 its
annual budget was two billion.
The influx of federal monies to a poor region of a generally impoverished
state has been without precedent. A 1996 economic survey of the impact of
Los Alamos National Laboratory on northern New Mexico concluded that
one of every 23 state jobs was either created or supported by the laboratory.
The 1.1-billion-dollar funding for the fiscal year 1996 multiplied into about
four billion, or about five percent of the total economic activity for the entire
state.66 In an unforeseen way, the spread of this income throughout northern
66 Robert R. Lansford et al., The Economic Impact of Los Alamos National Laboratory on North-
Central New Mexico and the State of New Mexico, Fiscal Year 1996 (Office of Technology and
Site Programs, Albuquerque, NM, 1997), p. 13.
New Mexico has allowed traditional Native American and Hispanic crafts to
revive and flourish. The Lab provided steady employment for the craftspeople
as well as potential purchasers for their various art works.
Yet there is a dark side to the Oppenheimer link with New Mexico as well.
Since the Manhattan Project was viewed as a crash program, few gave much
concern to the long-term environmental consequences. Its successor agency,
the Atomic Energy Commission, did not institute its first committee along
these lines until 1947.67 At the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, envi-
ronmental issues have come to virtually dominate national and state concerns.
The terrible Cerro Grande fire of 2000 allegedly uncovered 300 toxic sites on
the Hill. In 2004, the New Mexico State Environment Department, aided by
various private organizations, remained locked in conflict with the Laboratory
over environmental pollution, especially over potential contamination of the
Rio Grande by creeping plutonium.68
Not all these environmental problems can be laid at Oppenheimer’s
doorstep, of course, but he does bear responsibility for a few. In 1975, the
successor to the AEC, the U.S. Energy Research and Development Admin-
istration (ERDA) discovered a plutonium “pocket” south of the Los Alamos
Inn. Further research concluded that the now-open location originally housed
the Technical Area laundry. As plutonium washed off workers’ clothes, it
ended up lodged in the drain. Eventually, the contamination was removed
to a burial site.69
The main area of radioactive contamination from the Oppenheimer
years remains that of the Trinity Site, for the July 16, 1945 detonation surely
fell under his watch. Since the Trinity “gadget” exploded only 100 feet above
the ground, the ball of fire touched the earth, fusing the sand into radioactive
greenish-grey glass and driving the plutonium deep into the soil. Since the
half-life of plutonium is about 24,000 years, the fenced-in area of Trinity
Site in central New Mexico will reflect the legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
essentially forever.
A theologian once observed that the concept of forgiveness should lie at
the heart of any just society, for one can never anticipate the consequences of
67 Stephen I. Schwartz (ed.) Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons
Since 1940 (Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1998), p. 356.
68 Laura Paskos, “New Mexico Goes Head to Head with Nuclear Juggernaut,” High Country
News, 24 November 2003, 7–12.
69 Albuquerque Journal, 20 August 1975; ibid., 23 August 1975.
one’s actions. Although that observation holds true for the conventional areas
of life, because of the extended time periods involved, it seems to resonate with
special intensity whenever one speaks of things nuclear. It certainly should
apply to Oppenheimer as well.
Although the first generation of atomic scientists overflowed with bril-
liance, with the passing of years JRO has assumed the highest profile of them all.
Similarly, although the Manhattan Project could never have succeeded with-
out the contributions of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington,
the community most remembered today is Los Alamos. Perhaps the reciprocal
relationship between the state and the man may be summarized as this: the
awesome splendor of northern New Mexico restored J. Robert Oppenheimer
to health, and, in return, the state now houses both Trinity Site and a mag-
nificent scientific laboratory that is recognized, for better or worse, around
the globe.70 Whether this ranks as a fair exchange depends largely on the
perspective of the observer.
70 See the concise summary: “The Legacy of Los Alamos,” in Hoddeson et al., Critical Assembly,
pp. 402–417.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER: A WINDOW ON

HIS LIFE AT LOS ALAMOS
Kai Bird
Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Martin Sherwin
Professor of History at Tufts University
(An excerpt from their biography: American

Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert
Oppenheimer (Knopf, 2005).)
Los Alamos was an army camp — but it
also had many characteristics of a mountain resort.
Robert Wilson had just finished reading Thomas
Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and sometimes he
Kai Bird (left) and Martin now felt he had been transported to that magical
Sherwin (right) dominion.71 Western civilization was fighting a
Photo by Claudio Vazquez
global war for its very survival, but many of the
physicists at Los Alamos were overcome with feelings of sheer exhilaration.
It was a “golden time” said the English physicist James Tuck: “Here at Los
Alamos, I found a spirit of Athens, of Plato, of an ideal republic.”72 It was an
“island in the sky,” or as some new arrivals dubbed it, “Shangri-La.”73
71 Robert R. Wilson, “A Recruit for Los Alamos,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March
1975, 41.
72 Thorpe & Shapin, “Who was J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Social Studies of Science, August 2000,
547.
73 Charles Thorpe dissertation, p. 182; Jane S. Wilson and Charlotte Serber, Standing By and
Making Do: Women of Wartime Los Alamos (Los Alamos Historical Society, Los Alamos, NM,
1988), p. 5.
66
Robert Oppenheimer: A Window on his Life at Los Alamos 67
Within a very few months, Los Alamos forged a sense of community —

and many of the wives credited Oppenheimer. Early on, in a nod to participa-
tory democracy, he appointed a Town Council; later it became an elected body,
and though it had no formal power, it met regularly and helped Oppenheimer
keep in touch with the community’s needs. Here the mundane complaints of
life on the mesa — the quality of PX food, housing conditions and parking
tickets — could be vented with gusto. By the end of 1943, Los Alamos had a
low-power radio station that broadcasted a little news, community announce-
ments and music, drawn in part from Oppenheimer’s large collection of classi-
cal records. In small ways he made it known that he understood and appreciated
the sacrifices everyone was making. Despite the lack of privacy, the Spartan
conditions and the recurring shortages in water, milk and even electricity, he
infected people with his own special sense of jocular élan. “Everyone in your
house is quite mad,” Oppenheimer told Bernice Brode one day, “You should
get on fine together.”74 (The Brodes lived in an apartment above the Cyril
Smiths and Edward Tellers.) When the local theatre group put on a produc-
tion of Arsenic and Old Lace, the audience was stunned to see Oppenheimer,
powdered white with flour and looking stiff as a corpse, carried on stage and
laid out on the floor with the other victims of Joseph Kesselring’s murder
mystery. And when in the autumn of 1943 a young woman, the wife of a
group leader, suddenly died of a mysterious paralysis — and the community
feared a polio contagion — Oppenheimer was the first to visit the grieving
husband.75
In September 1943, after a whirlwind courtship, Oppie’s secretary,
Priscilla Greene, married a chemist on the Hill, Robert Duffield. Oppenheimer
was supposed to have given away the bride at a Santa Fe wedding in the stately
adobe home of Dorothy McKibbin.76 But at the last moment, General Groves
called Oppenheimer away for a meeting in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Priscilla was
nevertheless touched when Oppie insisted on having her drive with him to his
74 Bernice Brode, Tales of Los Alamos, p. 39.

75 Smith and Weiner, p. 265; Bernice Brode, Tales of Los Alamos, pp. 23, 72.
76 Over the years, Dorothy McKibbin hosted more than thirty weddings in her home, including
the wedding of Peter Oppenheimer. (Nancy C. Steeper, Gatekeeper to Los Alamos: The Story of
Dorothy Scarritt McKibbin, p. 47 of draft manuscript.)
train so that he, a husband of less than three years, could share his wisdom on
the travails of marriage.
Oppie was the cook of the
household. He was still partial
to exotic hot dishes like nasi
goreng, but one of his stock din-
ners included steak, fresh aspara-
gus and potatoes prefaced by a
gin sour or martini. On April
22, 1943, he hosted the first
big party on the Hill to cele-
brate his 39th birthday. He plied
Oppenheimer House, Los Alamos his guests with the driest of dry
Courtesy of the Los Alamos Historical Society martinis and gourmet food —
though always on the scant side.
“The alcohol hits you harder at 8,000 feet,” recalled Dr. Louis Hempelmann,
“so everybody, even the most sober people, like Rabi, were just feeling no pain
at all. Everyone was dancing.” Oppie danced the foxtrot, in his usual old-
worldly style, holding his arm stiffly in front of him. Rabi amused everyone
that night when he took out his comb, wrapped it in toilet paper and played
it like a harmonica.77
Kitty refused to play the social role of a director’s wife. “Kitty was strictly
a blue jeans and Brooks Brothers shirt kind of gal,” recalled one Los Alamos
friend.78 Initially, she worked part-time as a lab technician under the super-
vision of Dr. Hempelmann, whose job it was to study the health hazards of
radiation. “She was awful bossy,” he recalled.79 Only occasionally did she
invite old Berkeley friends over for dinner. But she never had the kind of open
house parties expected of the director’s wife. The Oppenheimers’ next-door
neighbors, however, liked to entertain. Deke and Martha Parsons held many
of these events. Oppie encouraged everyone to work hard and play hard. “On
Saturdays we raised whoopee,” wrote Bernice Brode, “on Sundays we took
trips, the rest of the week we worked.”
77 Dr. Louis Hempelmann interview by Sherwin, 10 August 1979, p. 29.

78 Anne Wilson Marks interview by Kai Bird, 5 March 2002.
79 Dr. Louis Hempelmann interview by Sherwin, 10 August 1979, 8, 24.
On Saturday evenings the Lodge was

often packed with square-dancers, the men
dressed in jeans, cowboy boots and color-
ful shirts, the women wearing long dresses
bulging with petticoats. Not surprisingly,
the resident bachelors hosted the rowdi-
est parties. These dorm parties were fueled
by a concoction of half lab alcohol and
half grapefruit juice mixed into a 32 gal-
lon G.I. can and chilled with a chunk of
smoking dry ice. One of the younger scien-
tists, Mike Michnovicz, sometimes played
his accordion while everyone danced.
Occasionally, some of the physi-
cists gave piano and violin recitals. Bernice Brode and Jim Tuck at a
Los Alamos dance
Oppenheimer dressed up for these Sat- Courtesy of the Los Alamos Historical
urday evening affairs, wearing one of his Society
finely tailored, tweedy suits. Invariably, he was the center of attraction. “If you
were in a large hall,” Dorothy McKibbin recalled, “the largest group of people
would be hovering around what, if you could get your way through, would
be Oppenheimer. He was great at a party and women simply loved him.”80
On one occasion someone threw a theme party: “Come as Your Suppressed
Desire.” Oppie came dressed in his ordinary suit, with a napkin draped over
his arm — as if to imply that he wished merely to be a waiter. It was a pose no
doubt designed to reflect a studied humility rather than any real inner longing
for anonymity. As the scientific director of the most important project in the
war, Oppenheimer was actually living his desire.
On Sundays many residents went for hikes or picnics in the nearby
mountains, or rented the horses boarded at the Los Alamos Boys School’s
former stables. Oppenheimer rode his own horse, Chico, a beautiful fourteen-
year-old chestnut, on a regular route from the east side of town west towards
the mountain trails. Oppie could make Chico “single-foot” — trot by placing
all four hooves down at different times — over the roughest trails. Along
80 Bernice Brode, Tales of Los Alamos, pp. 23, 72; Dr. Louis Hempelmann interview by Sherwin,
10 August 1979, p. 30; Dorothy McKibbin interview by Jon Else, 10 December 1979, p. 22.
the way he greeted everyone he encountered with a wave of his mud-colored

pork-pie hat and a passing remark. Kitty was also a “very good horseman, really
European trained.” Initially, she rode “Dixie,” a full standard bred pacer who
had once run the races in Albuquerque. Later she switched to a thoroughbred.
An armed guard always accompanied them.81
Oppenheimer’s physical sta-
mina atop a horse or hiking in the
mountains invariably surprised his
companions. “He always looked so
frail,” recalled Dr. Hempelmann.
“He was always so painfully thin,
of course, but he was amazingly
strong.” During the summer of
Oppenheimer on Mt. Wilson 1944, he and Hempelmann rode
together over the Sangre de Cristo
Mountains to his “Perro Caliente” ranch. “It nearly killed me,” said Hempel-
mann. “He was on his horse with the single-foot gait, perfectly comfortable,
and my horse had to go into a hard trot to keep up with him. I think the first
day we must have ridden 30 to 35 miles, and I was nearly dead.”82 Though
rarely sick, Oppie suffered from smoker’s cough, the result of a four or five
pack a day habit. “I think he only picked up a pipe,” said one of his secretaries,
“as an interlude from the chain-smoking.”83 Given to spasms of uncontrolled
bouts of coughing, his face would sometimes flush purple as he persisted in
talking through his cough. Just as he made a ceremony of mixing his martinis,
Oppie smoked his cigarettes with singular style. Where most men used their
index finger to tap ashes off the end of their cigarettes, he had the peculiar
mannerism of brushing the ash from the tip by using the end of his little
finger. The habit had so calloused the tip of his finger that it appeared almost
charred.84
81 Dr. Louise Hempelmann interview by Sherwin, 10 August 1979, p. 10; Bernice Brode, Tales of
Los Alamos, pp. 56, 88–93; Dorothy McKibbin interview by Jon Else, 10 December 1979, p. 20;
John D. Wirth and Linda Harvey, Aldrich, Los Alamos: The Ranch School Years, 1917–1943,
(University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM, 2003), p. 261.
83 Anne Wilson Marks interview by Kai Bird, 5 March 2002.
84 Peer de Silva, unpublished manuscript, p. 1, courtesy of Gregg Herken.
Gradually, life on the mesa became comfortable, if not luxurious. Sol-

diers chopped firewood and stacked it for use in each apartment’s kitchen
and fireplace. The Army also collected the garbage and stoked the heating
furnaces with coal. Every day the Army bussed in Pueblo Indian women from
the nearby settlement of San Ildefonso to work as housekeepers. Dressed in
deerskin-wrapped boots and colorful Pueblo shawls and wearing a bounty
of turquoise and silver jewelry, the Pueblo women quickly became a familiar
sight around town. Early each morning, after checking in with the Army’s
Maid Service Office near the town water tower, they could be seen trudging
along the dirt roads toward their assigned Los Alamos household for half a
day — which is why the residents began calling them their “half-days.” The
idea — endorsed by Oppenheimer and administered by the Army — was
that such maid service would allow the wives of project scientists to work as
secretaries, lab assistants, school teachers or “computing-machine operators”
in the Tech Area. This in turn would help the Army to keep the population
of Los Alamos to a minimum. Maid service was assigned largely on the basis
of need, depending on the importance and hours of a housewife’s job, the
number of young children and on occasions of illness. Not always perfect, this
bit of army socialism greatly eased life on the mesa and helped to turn the
isolated laboratory into a fully employed, working community.85
∗∗∗
While most Los Alamos
spouses adapted to the stark cli-
mate, isolation and rhythms of
the mesa, Kitty increasingly felt
trapped. She wanted desperately
what Los Alamos could give her
husband — but as a bright woman
who thought of herself as a biolo-
gist, she felt stymied professionally.
After a year had passed, she told Dr.
Hempelmann that she didn’t think Party at Los Alamos
the blood counts she was doing for Courtesy of the Los Alamos Historical Society
him as a lab technician meant anything — so she quit. She also felt isolated
85 Bernice Brode, Tales of Los Alamos, pp. 28, 33, 51–52.

socially. If she was in the mood, she could be charming and warm with friends
or strangers. But everyone sensed that there was an edge to this woman. Often,
she seemed tense and unhappy. At Los Alamos social gatherings she could
make small talk with people, but as one friend put it, “She wanted to make
big talk.”86 Joseph Rotblat, a young Polish physicist, saw her occasionally at
parties or in the Oppenheimer home for dinner. “She seemed to be very much
aloof,” Rotblat said, “a haughty person.”87
Oppenheimer’s secretary, Priscilla Greene Duffield had an ideal perch
from which to observe Kitty. “She was a very intense, very intelligent, very
vital kind of person,” Duffield recalled. But she also thought Kitty was “very
difficult to handle.”88 Pat Sherr, a neighbor and the wife of another physicist,
felt overwhelmed by Kitty’s meteoric personality. “She was outwardly very gay
and exuded some warmth,” recalled Sherr. “I later realized that it wasn’t any
real warmth for people, but it was part of her terrible need for attention, for
affection.”
Like Robert, Kitty tended to shower people with gifts. When Sherr
complained one day about the kerosene stove in her cabin, Kitty gave her an
old electric stove. “She would give me gifts and envelop me totally,” Sherr
said.89 Other women found her abrupt manner verging on insulting. But so
too did many men, even though Kitty seemed to prefer the company of men.
“She’s also one of the very few people I’ve heard men — and very nice men —
call a bitch,” recalled Duffield. But it was also clear to Duffield that her boss
trusted Kitty and turned to her for advice about all manner of issues. “He
would give her judgment as much weight as that of anyone whose advice he
chose to ask,” she said.90 Kitty was the kind of wife who never hesitated to
interrupt her husband, even though he, of course, was the kind of man who
was always finishing other people’s sentences for them. “It never seemed to
bother him,” recalled one close friend.91
Kitty intimidated nearly everyone else. The Los Alamos security offi-
cer, Captain Peer de Silva, spent much of his time observing the Director’s
wife. He thought her both highly attractive and dangerous, and later wrote
86 Pat Sherr interview by Sherwin, 20 February 1979.

87 Joseph Rotblat interview by Sherwin, 16 October 1989, p. 8.
88 Peter Goodchild, J. Robert Oppenheimer, p. 127.
90 Peter Goodchild, J. Robert Oppenheimer, p. 127.
of her: “Vivacious, obviously proud of her sexiness, highly intelligent and

articulate. Good looking in a pug-nosed kind of way, good figure. Tough
woman. . . somewhat short, well and firmly built, well dressed. Very much the
No. 1 wife in a society of many scientific wives.”92
∗∗∗
Early in 1945 Priscilla Duffield had a baby and Oppenheimer suddenly
needed a new secretary. Groves offered him several seasoned secretaries, but
Oppenheimer rejected each of them until one day he told Groves that he
wanted Anne T. Wilson, a pretty blond, blue-eyed, twenty-year-old whom he
had met in Groves’s office. The daughter of a Navy officer and a neighbor
of Groves’s in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, DC, Anne
Wilson had played tennis with Groves at the Army–Navy Club before he
recruited her one day to work as one of his personal assistants. A blunt-speaking
firecracker of a young woman, Wilson initially refused the job offer, telling
Groves, “You’re too ornery!”
Wilson had heard all about Oppenheimer when one day he came by
Groves’s office in Washington. “He stopped at my desk — which was right
outside the general’s door — and we made conversation,” Wilson said. “I was
just practically dumbstruck because here was this legendary character and part
of his legend was that all women fell on their faces in front of him.” Groves
later told her that he had offered Oppenheimer any number of secretaries, but
that he had turned them all down. “He looked at me,” Groves related, “with
those blue eyes and he says, ‘I think I’d like to have Miss Wilson.’ ”93
Flattered, Wilson agreed to move out to Los Alamos. Before she
went, however, Lt. Col. John Lansdale (Groves’s counter-intelligence chief )
approached her with an offer: he would pay her $200 a month if she sent
him just one letter each month reporting on what she saw in Oppenheimer’s
office. Shocked, Wilson flatly refused to serve as his informant. “I told him,”
she later said, “Lansdale, I want you just to pretend you never even mentioned
such a thing to me.” She said Groves had assured her that once she moved
out to Los Alamos, her loyalties were to be to Oppenheimer. But, perhaps
not surprisingly, she learned after the war that Groves had ordered that she be
covered by surveillance whenever she left Los Alamos — after working in his
office he believed Annie Wilson knew too much to be left unwatched.
92 Peer de Silva, unpublished manuscript, p. 3.

93 Anne Wilson Marks interview with Bird, 5 March 2002.
Upon arriving in Los Alamos, Wilson learned that Oppenheimer was

sick in bed with chicken pox, accompanied by a 104 degrees fever. “Our thin,
ascetic Director,” wrote the wife of another physicist, “looked like a fifteenth-
century portrait of a saint with his fever-stricken eyes peering out from a face
checkered with red patches and covered by a straggling beard.”94 One day
while Oppie was lying in his sick bed, Pat Sherr came by with her four-year-
old daughter Lizzie and explained that the camp pediatrician wanted the child
exposed to chicken pox before her mother gave birth to a new baby. “It was
a very amusing afternoon,” Sherr recalled. “He was very sweet with her, very
sweet. He looked a mess, he was really full of it and his head was shaved and
he had it [chicken-pox scabs] all over his head. So we put Lizzie in his bed and
Kitty kept saying, ‘Touch him,’ and Lizzie didn’t like this thing at all. But he
was very sweet with her and he’d say, ‘You can touch me here, this isn’t such a
bad one and then he would rub his arm against her leg. It was ridiculous! She
never got it from him.”95
Soon after he had recovered, Wilson was invited over to the Oppenheimer
home for drinks. Oppenheimer served her one, and then another, of his famous
gin martinis, and as she was not yet acclimatized to the altitude, the power-
ful concoction quickly went to her head. Wilson remembered having to be
escorted back to her room in the nurses’ quarters.
Annie Wilson was fascinated
by her charismatic new boss and
deeply admired him. But at twenty,
she was not attracted romantically to
Oppenheimer, a married man nearly
twice her age in 1945. Still, Anne
was a beautiful young woman, smart
and sassy — and people began to
talk on the Hill about the Director’s
new secretary. Several weeks after her
arrival, Anne began receiving a sin-
gle rose in a vase, delivered every
Oppenheimer, Kitty, and their children three days from a florist in Santa Fe.
94 Jane S. Wilson and Charlotte Serber (eds.), Standing By and Making Do, p. 50.
95 Pat Sherr interview by Sherwin, 20 February 1979, p. 29.
The mysterious roses came without a card. “I was totally baffled, so I went
around in my childlike way, saying, ‘I got a secret lover. Who is sending all
these gorgeous roses?’ I never found out. But finally, one person said to me,
‘There is only one person who would do that, and that’s Robert.’ Well, I said
it’s ridiculous.”
Los Alamos was a small town and soon rumors began circulating that
Oppenheimer was having an affair with Wilson. She said it never happened: “I
have to tell you that I was too young to appreciate him. Maybe I thought a forty-
year-old man was ancient.” Inevitably, Kitty heard the rumors and one day
she confronted Wilson and asked her pointblank if she had designs on Robert.
Annie was thunderstruck. “She could not have misread my astonishment,”
Wilson recalled.96
In the years to come Annie got married, Kitty relaxed, and an enduring
friendship developed. If Robert had been attracted to Annie, the anonymous
single red rose was a subtle gesture not out of character. He was not the kind
of man who initiated sexual conquests. As Wilson herself observed, women
“gravitated” to Oppenheimer: “He really was a man of women,” Wilson said. “I
could see that and I heard plenty of that.” But at the same time, the man himself
was still painfully shy and even unworldly. “He was enormously empathetic,”
Wilson said. “This was, I think, the secret of his attraction for women. I mean
it felt almost that he could read their minds — many women have said this
to me. Women at Los Alamos who were pregnant could say, ‘The only one
who would understand was Robert.’ He had a really almost saintly empathy
for people.”97 And if he was attracted to other women, he still seemed devoted
to his marriage. “They were terribly close,” Hempelmann said of Kitty and
Robert. “He would come home in the evenings whenever he could. I think
she was proud of him, but I think she would have liked to have been more in
the center of things.”98
∗∗∗
Inside the barbed wire, Kitty sometimes felt like she was living under a
microscope. The Army commissary often had foods and goods only available
on the outside with a ration card. The theatre showed two movies a week
96 Anne Wilson Marks interview by Bird, 14 March 2002.

97 Anne Wilson Marks interview by Bird, 5 March 2002.
98 Dr. Louis Hempelmann, interview by Sherwin, 10 August 1979, p. 25.
for only 15 cents a show. Medical care was free. So many young couples had
babies — some eighty births were recorded the first year and about ten a
month thereafter — that the small seven-room hospital was labeled “RFD”
for “rural free delivery.” When General Groves complained about all the new
babies, Oppenheimer wryly observed that the duties of a scientific director did
not include birth control.99 By then, Kitty was pregnant again. On December
7, 1944, she gave birth in the Los Alamos barracks hospital to a daughter,
Katherine, whom they nicknamed “Tyke.” A sign was posted over the crib,
saying “Oppenheimer,” and for several days people filed by to take a peek at
the boss’s baby girl.100
Four months later, Kitty announced she “just had to go home [to
Philadelphia] to see her parents.” Perhaps it was postpartum depression, or
the excess of martinis in the Oppenheimer home, or the state of her marriage,
but Kitty was on the verge of an emotional collapse. “Kitty had begun to break
down, drinking a lot,” recalled Pat Sherr. Kitty and Robert were also having
problems with their two-year-old son. Like any toddler, Peter was a handful.
And according to Sherr, Kitty “was very, very impatient with him.” A trained
psychologist, Sherr thought Kitty “had absolutely no intuitive understanding
of the children.”101 Kitty had always been mercurial. Her sister-in-law, Jackie
Oppenheimer, observed that Kitty “would go off on a shopping trip for days
to Albuquerque or even to the West Coast and leave the children in the hands
of the maid. They had one maid, a German one, and she was a regular tyrant.”
Upon her return, Kitty would bring an enormous present for Peter. “She must
have felt so guilty and unhappy,” said Jackie, “the poor woman.”102
99 By June 1944, one-fifth of all the married women in Los Alamos were pregnant. Charles
Thorpe dissertation, p. 276; Jane S. Wilson and Charlotte Serber (eds.), Standing By and Making
Do, p. 92; Robert Serber with Robert P. Crease, Peace & War, p. 83.
100 Bernice Brode, Tales of Los Alamos, p. 22.
102 Frank and Jackie Oppenheimer interview by Sherwin; Peter Goodchild, Oppenheimer:
Shatterer of Worlds, p. 128.
CHAPTER THREE
Oppenheimer’s Place in History
77
78
STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF

GIANTS
Everet Beckner
Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs,
National Nuclear Security Administration, Department of Energy
The quotation, “standing on the shoulders of

giants,” comes from Sir Isaac Newton: “If I have
seen further it is by standing on the shoulders
of giants.” To use this quotation as a theme for
the work done during the Manhattan Project
is something of a challenge. Because the first
thing that I’ve asked myself is, considering the
time — the 1600s — to whom was Newton
referring?
We think back in time to the giants in sci-
ence or philosophy, or whatever topic you want
to think about, from the perspective that we have
Everet Beckner
today. Think of how early Newton was in the devel-
opment of science. It is very difficult to come up with more than two or three
or four names that might have been on his mind — people conceivably like
Galileo, or Copernicus, names that really are very early in the development of
science.
His quotation, however, is one which I think is useful for us today. I want
to introduce you to a few others before I get started, because once you get into
a topic like this, you get kind of interested in some of the other quotations
that are from scientists whom you know something about.
79
80 Oppenheimer’s Place in History
The one that I am going to refer to first is one that I will turn to a little
bit later:
In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to
whom the idea first occurs.
Now that quotation is from Darwin and I will return to it because it has a lot
to do with some of the views of Oppenheimer himself.
There are some others I want to note, for instance, Niels Bohr, about
whom any physicist is aware. This quotation was attributed to him some time
between 1945 and 1962:
Anybody who is not shocked by this subject has failed to understand it.
Pretty good quotation!

Following that, I’d like to call your attention to this one by Wernher von
Braun in 1973:
Basic research is what I’m doing, but I don’t know what I’m doing!
I think that sentiment fits really well here at Los Alamos.

And then I want to return to a quotation that most frequently is
attributed to Oppenheimer, and that is the one attributed to him in 1947
at MIT:
The physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.
I think that is troubling, because of Oppenheimer’s use of the word “sin.” For
those of us who are of European heritage, or certainly those who are of early
American heritage, there is such a conservative ethic upon our lives, and as a
result there are very serious implications for many of us when the word “sin”
is used. I would interpret this quote differently, today, and I would turn to the
quotation that I brought to your attention first, from Darwin, to explain it:
In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to
whom the idea first occurs.
I believe that Oppenheimer led the movement that proved that nuclear
energy could result in a nuclear weapon, and that is what made the dif-
ference. When you hear Oppenheimer quoted, you almost think that in
many ways, he might have been relieved if the bomb had not worked.
But it was inevitable — it was inevitable. We all know that now, we
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants 81
know it from our deep understanding of

nuclear physics and the work of scientific
giants. We know it from our groping attempts
to understand the origin of the universe, and
the fact that much of that knowledge does now
seem to fit together in ways that are becoming
coherent.
So it was inevitable. We need to think
about others who were involved and the role
that they played. Finally, I want to return to
the larger question of what this all means,
not just in the context of science, but in the
broader perspective of world history, when we Albert Einstein
talk about the “shoulders of giants.”
So let’s just think, for a few moments, about the other “giants” of the time.
Early in physics, of course, the ones that stand out most are Newton himself
and then I might add four more which could be called the “super-giants” of
physics. They are Michael Farraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Niels Bohr, and
Albert Einstein. For those who specialize in physics, it is easy to agree that
those are among the greatest physicists who have ever lived. There may be
others. There certainly are physicists today who will fall under that category
when we look back in another hundred years. But from today’s perspective,
these are probably the greatest and the “giants” to which we will point when
we think about planning the future.
Following that group, there are other physicists who have distinguished
themselves in a more specialized field. When you talk about nuclear physics —
and that obviously is our theme, here — the “giants” who come to mind are
Werner Heisenberg, Ernest Rutherford, Ernest Lawrence, Hans Bethe, Erwin
Schrödinger, and Enrico Fermi. Now, for those of you asking why I haven’t
gotten to a few other names already, I’ve got my next list. But I believe that
these scientists affected physics more broadly than the next group that I will
be talking about. Their impact was indeed in the areas which we think of
as nuclear physics, but it was somewhat broader than that, and furthermore
was an impact which is undeniable. You won’t find anyone who will argue
with that when you use those names. Of that group, only one is still living,
Hans Bethe.
In the next group, one certainly will encounter Oppenheimer — and

Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Edward Teller, Richard Feynman, Eugene
Wigner, Steven Weinberg and John von Neumann. I could easily have added
more names to that list, but I tried to keep it somewhat short! These are the
scientists whom I believe were responsible for application of this understand-
ing that evolved from the earlier giants of nuclear physics. They contributed in
many ways, but particularly because they really understood how to apply their
ideas. Out of this work came the nuclear weapons program. Out of this work
came the nuclear reactor program. This group of physicists was responsible
for both the peaceful and the military uses of the nuclear energy and all that
flowed from that work.
And this development really led us to
“big science,” as we think of it today. You
look around today and you will find that sci-
entific journal articles are as likely to have
forty authors as they are to have four, let alone
one. Science has changed greatly during this
time, as has the world. It did so riding on the
shoulders of these giants.
Now where have we gone since then?
All of this work, for the most part, was done
before 1950, certainly before 1960, and it is
now forty years later. And what we have is a
Enrico Fermi whole new set of giants. They are working in
other areas that are offshoots of earlier work
in physics. Probably the field that first comes to mind is what we generally
call “microelectronics.” That has come out of the work of early physicists who
were looking at other applications for the same ideas. The eminent scientists
in this field are John Bardeen, Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes who were
working on early ideas of transistors and lasers. You have another set of people
working on nuclear fusion and the names that really come first are Bethe and
Teller. Out of that, more broadly, people have come to identify cosmology as
a legitimate science — in fact, it is the dominant science now, as we look to
the future. And there are giants in this field that are only just being identified.
Many are yet to be fully identified.
The next set of scientists I’d like to mention are in biology — another
area of study that will change the world. And in that regard, it is easy to bring it
all back to Darwin again. Darwin clearly set the stage for what’s going on now
in genetics and cellular biology, and the whole field is exploding. From this line
of research we are going to see things like genetic manipulation and artificial
intelligence, which will be a combination of all those microelectronics, lasers,
and cellular biology. Somewhere in there we are going to figure out how to
improve upon the brain.
And a few people are beginning to occupy that stage. The name that I
would think of first is Steven Pinker. So you do pick up these names, and you
see some of the giants developing, and you recognize that they all have in fact
stood on those shoulders of the earlier giants.
So, that is the way it works for all of us. I think that our future work
depends greatly upon the people who have helped us get started. If they turned
out to be particularly illustrious people, then obviously we got an early chance
to stand on some large shoulders. And many of the people in this audience, I
think, can identify people who were that important to them, who have made
a real difference in their work.
Let me now put on my Washington hat and say just a few words about
the larger scene as I see it today. The question is how do we move the world
forward, in circumstances which look extraordinarily intractable, more so than
I’ve seen in many years — and I’ve now been around long enough to have
seen quite a few difficult times. In order to approach this question, we can
look back at history again, at some of the giants, but in this case they are of a
different kind.
I happened to have just finished reading a book on the life of Genghis
Khan, and indeed, there’s a lot to be learned from him as we view the troubles
of the world today. He was able to conquer half the world, half the civilized
world of the time — or at least he, and his sons and his grandsons did this
during the 13th and 14th centuries. From China to the Mediterranean, from
southern Russia to India, Genghis Khan did it by coming up with a new way
of waging war, as it turned out. He gave every one of his soldiers a horse, and
went to war. And pretty soon he won, every time. And he ruled ruthlessly.
Thereby Genghis Khan and his descendents controlled that world for more
than one hundred years.
Now, this domination came to an end for a very strange reason. I do not
think people realize this, but the black plague essentially was the transitioning
event because it forced all communication, transportation and interactions
to cease. As everyone around them was dying, people realized that the only
way to keep from getting the black plague was not to interact with anybody
else. So they shut themselves up in their houses. They stopped moving. They
stopped commerce. Of course, huge numbers of them simply died. But by the
time the black plague subsided, the empire of Genghis Khan had more or less
disintegrated and had become disconnected from the rest of the world.
One thing had happened, however, to set the stage for the next great
events of the world. Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson, had tried twice
to invade and conquer Japan by sea, using ships that were built in China. He
failed both times. But that was the beginning of sea warfare. Kublai Khan’s
army did not do very well at it, but the giants who came along next, such as
Henry the Navigator and obviously Christopher Columbus, did. The nations
which turned their armies into sea warriors became the great sea powers: Spain,
France, and England. That was the beginning of sea power which then led to
a whole new process for waging war and controlling the world.
That lasted more than a hundred years. The next set of giants began
to realize that there was yet another way to control political situations, which
turned out to be the airplane. The Wright brothers and other pioneers of flight
led to a fundamental shift in the way we interact with each other on the world
stage, and the way people wage war.
One of the next steps in this progression was the development of nuclear
weapons, which was the next defining event in world politics as well as in
science. Along the way, too, there was the development of nuclear submarines
by scientists and engineers. These strategies involving nuclear weapons played
out reasonably well in the 50s and 60s, and 70s and 80s, under a strategy
which we ended up calling “mutually assured destruction.” We had too many
nuclear weapons for the Russians to ever think about attacking us, and they
had too many nuclear weapons for anyone else in the world to think about
attacking them. So we lived together in something that was very tenuous — a
peace with trouble from time to time — for the better part of forty years.
Now, we’ve reached today. It is clear we don’t know how to use this
power to control the world at this point in time. We don’t know how to use
the weapons we have to control the world and its terrorism. The last guy who
knew how to do that, in fact, was Genghis Khan! Now, that is not a very
pleasant analogy to use for thinking about the future. After all, Genghis Khan
did it just by killing everybody who didn’t agree with him. When he would
come to a town, he would first send in messengers telling them that if they
would all agree to surrender, he would come in and take over. If they wouldn’t,
he was going to kill them. And that is exactly what he did.
I do not think any of us believe that to be the way to go forward at this
point in time. But the problem is we do not know how to go forward. And it
is with this thought that I am going to close. It is the interplay of science and
world politics which has provided the great policy and technology problems
that have driven the course of history for the past six hundred years. Recently,
for instance, the chemists helped us find ways to make poison gas, which was
used in the First World War. The physicists came up with a way to make
nuclear weapons, used in the Second World War, and as deterrents to war for
the next fifty years. Right now, I don’t think we have a solution to the terrorism
problems of the world. So, I think we need first to recognize that fact, and
then find ways to craft the solutions. That is the troubling world we live in, but
it is the real one. It may be that, at this particular point in time, we need the
shoulders of a few political giants, rather than scientific giants, to stand upon.
THE CAUTIONARY TALE OF ROBERT

OPPENHEIMER
Gregg Herken
Professor, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts,
University of California, Merced
The notion that scientists have no “proprietary

rights” to say what should be done with their inven-
tions was expressed by Robert Oppenheimer a month
before the explosion of the first atomic bomb. A
month after two atomic bombs had been dropped
on Japan, not even Oppenheimer believed in this
prescription. In 1949, Oppenheimer would oppose
development of the hydrogen bomb on both practi-
cal and ethical grounds. The loyalty hearing that took
Gregg Herken place five years later suggests that science in the ser-
vice of the state bears a potential cost, for both sides.
Some fifty years ago, when asked what impact the Cold War had had
upon his discipline, Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth reportedly
replied: “Secrecy, scientists who will take orders, and big equipment.” Two
of the things that Smyth mentioned — secrecy and big equipment — are
undoubted legacies of the Cold War. But the third — the willingness of sci-
entists to take orders — is a more problematic and complicated tale, precisely
because of the Cold War, and because of the particular experience of one
scientist who answered the summons: Robert Oppenheimer.
When he was chosen by General Groves to direct the Los Alamos labo-
ratory in the fall of 1942, Oppenheimer showed no hesitation about working
on the atomic bomb. Indeed, after Oppie came under suspicion by Army
86
The Cautionary Tale of Robert Oppenheimer 87
counter-intelligence for his prewar left-wing views, it was Oppenheimer’s

ambition, not his patriotism, which convinced Groves’s head of security, John
Lansdale, that Oppie would not and could not be a spy for the Russians.
Near the end of the war, when Oppenheimer was chosen to serve on a
scientific panel (with Enrico Fermi, Ernest Lawrence, and Arthur Compton) to
advise on the use of the bomb, it was Oppenheimer, the head of the panel, who
argued that there was no practical alternative to military use of the weapon
against Japan. But as Oppenheimer also wrote to Secretary of War Henry
Stimson at that time:
With regard to these general aspects of the use of atomic energy, it is clear that
we, as scientific men, have no proprietary rights. It is true that we are among
the few citizens who have had occasion to give thoughtful consideration to
these problems during the past few years. We have, however, no claim to
special competence in solving the political, social, and military problems
which are presented by the advent of atomic power.
Even at the time that Oppenheimer wrote those words, his was probably
already a minority view among scientists working on the project. Leo Szilard
obviously felt no such compunction about telling the government what it
should do when he passed around his petition at the University of Chicago.
Edward Teller claims that he was sympathetic to Szilard’s appeal but that
Oppenheimer (who reminded Teller that it was not the job of scientists to
decide how the bomb was used) forbade him from circulating the petition at
Los Alamos, as Szilard had requested.
Within weeks of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer
himself had reversed his stand on the role of scientists. By September 1945,
Oppie was using his status as the “father” of the atomic bomb to importune
top officials in the Truman administration and even Truman himself on behalf
of his newfound cause: the international control of atomic energy.
Arguably the most famous, or notorious, instance of scientists speak-
ing the truth to power came some fours years later, in October 1949, when
Oppenheimer, then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General
Advisory Committee, drafted the GAC’s majority report, urging that the
nation not proceed with a crash effort to develop the hydrogen superbomb —
which the committee described as potentially “a weapon of genocide.”
As we know, the GAC’s advice was ignored, and a few years later (after
the prototype superbomb had been successfully tested) Oppenheimer was
brought to account for his views. Although the impetus behind the revocation
of Oppenheimer’s security clearance and the resulting loyalty hearing con-
cerned lies that Oppie had told to Army security agents during the war, the
evidence now available in AEC and FBI files leaves little doubt that the real
motivation behind the Oppenheimer trial (and its verdict) was Oppie’s so-
called “failure to enthuse” over the hydrogen bomb. The intent, therefore, was
not only to end Oppenheimer’s influence as a science adviser — which was
essentially at an end by this time anyway — but to “unfrock” Oppenheimer
before his peers.
With one dissenting vote, the AEC
declared Oppenheimer a loyal citizen, but
stripped him of his security clearance, just one
day before it was due to expire. The verdict had
two effects: it made Oppenheimer a martyr in
the scientific community, and it was the start
of Oppie’s academic exile at Princeton, which
would endure for nearly a decade. The mes-
sage that the state seemed to be sending to its
scientists in the Oppenheimer case was, “we
value your necessary inventions, but not your
unwanted advice.”
Oppenheimer at Princeton Oppenheimer would be partially rehabil-
itated in 1963, when he was awarded the Fermi
medal, but the Kennedy administration pointedly refused to reinstate his secu-
rity clearance on that occasion, lest the old controversy be revived. Although
Oppie died in 1967, his ghost is still very much with us — as Edward Teller
reminded in his memoirs, published just last year. Forty years after the infa-
mous loyalty hearing, Teller would attribute the difficulty he had in recruiting
scientists to work on Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative to the lin-
gering aftermath of the Oppenheimer case.
Today, nearly sixty years after the Oppenheimer trial, secrecy is with us
more than ever; big equipment as well. But the era when scientists were blindly
willing to follow orders — even in wartime — may well be over.
THE EARLY YEARS OF ROBERT

OPPENHEIMER
Jon Hunner
Associate Professor, Director of Public History Program at New Mexico State
University
Excerpt from Chasing Oppie, a forthcoming book from the University of

Oklahoma Press.
At the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, a boy was born in New York City who
would help make it the American Century. As
an adult, his research in nuclear physics, his
work on the Manhattan Project, and his advo-
cacy for civilian control of atomic weapons,
first helped create the Atomic Age and then to
direct it. Robert Oppenheimer was a complex
person and among the various perspectives
about him that will be offered at this con-
ference, I would like to add this. As a young
man, the American West greatly impacted
Oppenheimer. And in return, Oppenheimer
transformed the West. But in the beginning,
Robert Oppenheimer was a New Yorker. Jon Hunner
Photo by Darren Phillips
His parents, Ella and Julius Oppenheimer,
lived in a fashionable part of New York, on the upper west side of Manhattan.
Ella’s family, the Friedmans, was of European descent and had been in America
for several generations. As a painter, she had studied in Paris, and then returned
to New York to teach art. She always wore a curious glove on her right hand
89
which elicited stony silences when noted by visitors. She was born with a
disabled hand, so the glove contained an early prosthetic device that allowed
movement of an artificial thumb and forefinger.
Julius had come to America more recently than Ella’s family, having
arrived in 1888 when he was only seventeen. He had left Hanau, Germany,
where his father was a farmer and grain merchant. As soon as Julius got off
the passenger ship at New York, he started working in the city for two uncles
in their textile import business. Julius quickly worked his way up through the
ranks and became a successful businessman with sophisticated tastes.
Ella and Julius possibly met at an
art exhibition in New York. They mar-
ried in 1903, and on April 22, 1904,
Robert Oppenheimer was born to the cou-
ple at their apartment on West 94th Street
after a long labor. His birth certificate
reads “Julius Robert Oppenheimer,” which
in later years was shortened to “J. Robert
Oppenheimer.” Although both parents were
of Jewish descent, they did not strictly prac-
tise their religion. In fact, the Ethical Cultural
Movement, a secular off-shoot of Judaism,
attracted both parents. Founded in 1876 by
Felix Adler, the Ethical Cultural Movement
Robert and Frank Oppenheimer
sought to create a “Judaism of the Future”
based on deeds of beneficial social activities, in particular the moral and intel-
lectual education of the working classes.103 The Workingman’s School that
Adler created became so successful in attracting working class students and
in providing a good education that upper class Jews like the Oppenheimers
(whose children were barred admittance to many private schools at the time
because of anti-semitism) sought to have the school’s doors open to their chil-
dren. By the time that Julius served on their Board of Trustees from 1907
to 1915, the renamed Ethical Cultural School had expanded to accept such
children so that Robert entered it in 1911.104
103 Jeremy Bernstein, Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma, p. 9.

104 Bernstein, p. 6; Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb, p. 12; Peter Goodchild, J. Robert
Oppenheimer: The Shatterer of Worlds, pp. 10–11; Schweber, pp. 42–43, 48–49.
The Early Years of Robert Oppenheimer 91
Central to the mission of the Ethical Culture movement was the belief
that “man must assume responsibility for the direction of his life and destiny.”
Humans must answer to themselves, not to God, for their actions. For a person
who will create a weapon that killed tens of thousands of people and which
could destroy life as we know it, this belief would help explain Oppenheimer’s
actions after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.105
Later in life, Oppenheimer remembered that when he was ten or twelve,
his main interests were “minerals, writing poetry and reading, and building
with blocks.”106 On one of the family’s trips to Germany when Robert was
young, a grandfather, Ben, gave him a small collection of rocks with labels
written in German. The rocks fueled a scientific interest because he tried to
understand what he saw in them, things like the structure of the crystals, the
polarized light, and how rocks and crystals were formed. Oppenheimer cor-
responded with members of the New York Mineralogy Society and eventually
was invited to join and then give a paper at one of their meetings. Accompa-
nied by his father, they showed up at the meeting place only to be told that the
Robert Oppenheimer they expected to appear was not a boy of eleven. The
next youngest member of the Society was in his seventies.107
Oppenheimer’s parents fostered his brilliance. Later in life, Robert
recalled: “I think that both [my father] and my mother were pleased that I
was a good student, were pleased that I was highbrow, were perhaps somewhat
mockingly proud of my vigor in collecting and learning about minerals. . .”108
His intellectual intensity did worry his mother though: “I think my mother
especially was dissatisfied with the limited interest I had in play and in people
of my own age, and [. . .] I know she kept trying to get me to be more like
other boys, but with indifferent success.”109
On August 14, 1912, Robert gained a younger brother when Frank
Oppenheimer was born. Another brother had died in infancy before Frank
105 S. S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb, pp. 50, 52–53; Box 294, “Printed Matter,”
letter from Hillman to Hagy, p. 1, Box 294, J. Robert Oppenheimer papers (JRO), Library of
Congress, Manuscript Division (LC-MD); Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb,
p. 119; Bernstein, p. 10.
106 Schweber, p. 53.
107 Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner, Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, p. 3;
Goodchild, p. 11.
108 Smith and Weiner, p. 5.
was born. Eight years Frank’s elder, Robert was both a big brother and, as they
became adults, a mentor. Perhaps not quite as brilliant as Robert, Frank still
held his own around the family’s dinner table, and throughout most of their
lives, the brothers were close. They shared many common interests, from their
passion for the West, to their pursuit of physics, to their involvement in left-
wing causes. Their support in the 1930s of liberal organizations in California
came back to first haunt and then destroy both brothers’ lives in the 1950s.
Robert had already begun attending the Ethical Cultural School the
year before Frank’s birth. At the school where brilliance was expected, Robert
shone. His Greek and Latin instructor, Alberta Newton, recalled that “he
received every new idea as perfectly beautiful.” Even at an early age, Robert
was quick to grasp complex concepts and ideas and impatient in waiting for
his peers to catch up to him. So, he was often sent to the library to do advanced
work in math and when he returned, he explained it to the other students.
As a teenager at the Ethical Culture School, Robert was thin and gangly,
with a mass of brown hair and vivid blue eyes. Two teachers at the school had
a great impact on Oppenheimer: Augustus Klock and Herbert Smith. Klock
taught chemistry and physics to the school’s high school students. Building
upon the Oppenheimer’s fascination with mineralogy, Klock sparked a deeper
interest in science and the mechanics of our physical world. Klock introduced
Robert to the mysteries of the universe at the laboratory tables of the class-
room, and for a person with an inquiring mind and an active imagination,
the connection between what he saw in experiments and how that answered
questions both practical and profound satisfied the young man’s hunger for
knowledge.110
The other teacher that greatly influenced Oppenheimer was Herbert
Smith. Smith recalled: “Robert simply towered above all his brilliant contem-
poraries. He is certainly the most brilliant man I have ever met. . . It was imme-
diately obvious that he was a genius.”111 In Smith’s English class, which was a
college preparatory course, Robert brought his already lively interest in litera-
ture and poetry. Even though he usually sat and listened, Smith remembered
him as “a flawless student.”112 For years after Oppenheimer had left the Ethical
Culture School, he still exchanged poems and letters with Smith.

111 “Printed Matter,” Letter from Hillman to Hagy, p. 3, Box 294, JRO, LC-MD.
112 “Printed Matter,” Letter from Hillman to Hagy, p. 4, Box 294, JRO, LC-MD; Smith and
Weiner, p. 5.
Part of the troubles that Robert confronted was his awkwardness in social
settings. When he was fourteen, he attended a summer camp. In the midst of
an energetic outdoor life, his brainy nature and know-it-all attitude set him
up to be tormented by the other boys. A letter home that said that he was
learning about the “facts of life” resulted in a crackdown on the boys telling
dirty jokes and stories. As punishment, the other boys locked Robert overnight
in an icehouse without any clothes.113
A different view of the young Oppenheimer emerges from a classmate
of his. Jane Didisheim still held sharp memories of Robert fifty years after
she went to the Ethical Culture School with him: “He was very frail, very
pink-cheeked, very shy, and very brilliant of course. Very quickly everybody
admitted he was different from all the others and very superior. . . Aside from
that he was physically [. . .] rather undeveloped, not in the way he behaved
but the way he went about, the way he walked, the way he sat. There was
something strangely childish about him.”114
In addition to his easy mastery of math, science, and literature, Robert
also learned languages quickly. He wrote sonnets in French, spoke German,
picked up some Chinese. His quick mastery of new languages continued after
he left the school. In the 1930s, he taught himself Sanskrit so that he could
read the sacred texts of Hinduism, and once when he was a visiting professor
at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, he learned Dutch in six weeks
so he could present a lecture in that tongue. Smith reacted to Robert’s intellect
the way that many did: “His mind [was] so tremendous that it makes you
really uneasy.”115
One of the schoolmates that felt at ease with Robert was Francis
Fergusson who came to New York from the desert Southwest. To prepare him
for Harvard University, Francis left his native Albuquerque, New Mexico, and
attended the Ethical Culture School. There, he met and became good friends
with Robert. Francis went on to write plays, essays and histories of the arts,
produce theatrical pieces, and became a fixture in the arts and literary sphere
of New Mexico. For Robert, Francis not only held a similar keen intellect and
intensity, but he also offered a window into a different way of life, a Western
sensibility of vast panoramas, ancient cultures, and wide open opportunities.

114 Smith and Weiner, pp. 6–7.
115 “Printed Matter,” Letter from Hillman to Hagy, pp. 5–7, Box 294, JRP, LC-MD.
From their senior year at the Ethical Culture School, through their undergrad-
uate and graduate schooling, the New Yorker and the Westerner were the best
of friends.
Robert graduated from the Ethical Culture School in February 1921
at the age of seventeen. That summer, he traveled to Europe with his family.
Robert and Frank went on a prospecting trip to Bohemia, where he contracted
a severe case of dysentery. Already frail, the sickness forced him to postpone
his entrance into Harvard as he recovered, first in Europe and then back in the
States. Along with the dysentery, he also was struck with colitis. The extended
convalesce, first at his parents’ apartment in New York and then with several
trips, not only allowed him to recover but also to experience new parts of the
country. In the spring of 1922, he traveled to the South. By that summer,
Robert had recovered enough to plan an extended trip to the Southwest. To
cap off the year of recuperation with a vigorous trip west, Robert’s parents
asked the genial Herbert Smith to accompany their son in his travels.
The Southwest offered dramatic landscapes with high mountains and
distant vistas, peoples from the unique cultures, and a world view distinctly dif-
ferent from anything even the travel-savvy Robert had experienced in Europe.
Going West also offered an escape from the ills not only of one’s body, but of
industrial America. At about the same time that Robert and Herbert disem-
barked from the train in New Mexico, other people from the east — intellec-
tuals, writers, artists — sought refuge from the disappointments of the failed
peace after World War I and from the rampant consumerism and hustling
industrialism of the Roaring Twenties. Some of them found that refuge in the
mountains and towns of New Mexico.
For weeks, Robert and Herbert hiked and rode horses through the steep
mountains, camped outdoors, and stayed at guest ranches. Their headquar-
ters was Los Piños, a guest ranch at Cowles, high in the Sangre de Cristo
Mountains. Los Pinos was run by Katherine Chaves Page and her new hus-
band Winthrop. Katherine came from an established Hispanic family headed
by don Amado Chaves, and they accepted Oppenheimer and Smith into their
circle of family and friends. Smith later commented that because of Robert’s
acceptance by the patriarch don Amado and the aristocratic Chaves clan,
“for the first time in his life, [Robert] found himself loved, admired, sought
after. . .”116 For an insecure and sheltered young man, this acceptance did as
much as the crisp desert climate to cure him of his ailments.
Another family that embraced
Robert in New Mexico was the Fer-
gussons. He and Herbert visited
them in Albuquerque where they
met Francis’s brother Harvey and
sister Erna. Both Harvey, as a novel-
ist, and Erna, as a Southwest writer,
would distinguish themselves in the
coming years. The Fergussons also
introduced Robert to Paul Horgan,
a dashing young New Mexican who Sangre de Cristo Mountains
Courtesy of the National Archives and Records
also became a famous writer. Once Administration
Robert left New Mexico, he wrote
to many of his new friends and stayed connected to the desert Southwest
through correspondence and rendezvous with them on the East Coast. For a
young man who had traveled throughout Europe, the people Robert met in
provincial New Mexico that summer of 1922 remained friends for years. Their
companionship, liveliness, and alternative lifestyles counteracted Robert’s con-
ventional East Coast upbringing.
When one is exposed to new cultures, a code switching occurs. In lin-
guistics, code switching happens when a person changes from his dominate
language to a different one. For example, in New Mexico, one often hears
Spanish and English spoken in the same sentence, que no? This linguistic code
switching allows people to express themselves better by choosing words or
expressions that their native tongue does not adequately communicate. Code
switching also shows that a person is sophisticated, that he or she can speak in
more than one language. A cultural code switching also occurs when a person
finds something in another culture that is then incorporated into one’s own
beliefs and behavior. Through the centuries, clothing styles, cuisine, music,
religion, and other cultural attitudes have been freely borrowed whenever two

or more cultures come together. In the mountains of New Mexico, Robert

interacted with different cultures and adopted some of their beliefs and cul-
tural resources, which helped form his character.
Another part of their trip to New Mexico introduced Robert to a place
that would dramatically alter his future. Robert, Herbert, and several other
friends rode horses through Frijoles Canyon, where Native American ruins
from the 1300s hid among the stunted piñon pine and tall ponderosa pine
trees. Riding through the deeply crevassed plateaus and mountainsides, they
encountered an isolated boys’ school called “Los Alamos.” Twenty-one years
later, Robert would pick Los Alamos as the place to create the atomic bomb.
The time in the fresh air with vigorous physical activity challenged
Robert’s frail frame, and he prospered. The trip to the Southwest added the
final touch to his recovery, and he impressed Herbert with his stamina and nat-
ural ability with horses. In fact, Herbert commented that Robert displayed a
fatalistic attitude toward physical danger that bordered on the reckless. Robert
would return to the high mountains of New Mexico time and time again over
the next two decades to recover from his hectic life. He would visit it, write
about it in letters to friends, and eventually would buy land there before he
even bought a home of his own. And from New Mexico, he would launch a
new age that changed the world.117
Back on the East Coast, one of the places where the Oppenheimer family
entertained their friends was at Bay Shore, a town on the Atlantic Ocean side of
Long Island, about fifty miles away from Manhattan. On an estate of six acres,
the family spent many summers away from the heat of the city. Sailing one
of their two boats occupied their time. Lorelei, a 40-foot yacht, and a 28-foot
sloop, were tied up at the pier on the property. Robert and Frank named the
sloop Trimethy after the colorless liquid trimethylamine, which smelled like
pickled herring. The brothers took Trimethy and any visiting friends out on
the bay between their house and the outer island. Not known for physical
prowess, Robert nonetheless was an aggressive, even at times a reckless sailor.
One time, Robert and Paul Horgan sailed too close to the Fire Island inlet and
were carried out on the tide into the storm-tossed Atlantic breakers. For several
hours, they struggled to tack back into the more tranquil bay. Once back in
the bay, their progress back to the house was slow. Robert’s worried father sent
117 Rhodes, p. 121; Smith and Weiner, p. 10.

a revenue cutter out to search for them and around 11 p.m., it rescued them.
When they returned, however, Robert’s parents did not admonish them. And
the mad dashes across the bay on Trimethy continued.118
From Horgan’s visits to the Oppenheimers, both in New York and at
their summer house on Long Island, he remembered: “There were high spirited
goings on all the time. I think it is perfectly right to say that even then — and
all my life I’ve felt this — he was the most intelligent man I’ve ever known,
the most brilliantly endowed intellectually. And with this, in that period of
his life, he combined incredibly good wit and gaiety and high spirits.”119
Another aspect of Oppenheimer’s personality emerged as he grew. He at
times suffered from depression. Horgan recalled that: “Robert had bouts of
melancholy, deep, deep, depressions as a youngster. . . He would seem to be
incommunicado emotionally for a day or two at a time.” Others also observed
a moodiness in the young man, which combined with his social fumbling,
arrogance, and lack of patience, shows that he was troubled at times. In 1923,
he wrote to Francis Fergusson: “I find these awful people in me from time to
time, and their expulsion is the sole excuse for my writing.” Robert dealt with
this depression off and on throughout his life.120
After taking a year off to regain his physical as well as his mental health,
Robert entered Harvard University in the fall of 1922. He planned on com-
pleting the four-year degree in only three. To do this, he pushed himself hard.
He arrived at the laboratories early, took heavy loads of classes, and still had
time to audit courses in subjects not required for his degree. For most stu-
dents, a normal semester load of courses at Harvard was five, but Robert took
six courses for credit and often audited more. In one year, he took for credit
four chemistry classes, two in French literature, two in mathematics, one in
philosophy, and three more in physics. A Harvard classmate noted that Robert
“intellectually looted the place.”121
In a letter to Smith that first winter at Harvard, Robert pined for the
open spaces of the West. Replying to Smith’s plans to summer in New Mexico,
Robert wrote: “Of course, I am insanely jealous. I see you riding down from
the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms and sunsets
118 Smith and Weiner, pp. 34, 37; Goodchild, p. 34.

120 Smith and Weiner, pp. 9, 57.
121 Rhodes, p. 121.
caparison the sky; I see you in the Pecos [. . .] spending the moonlight on
Grass Mountain; I see you vending the marvels of the upper Loch, of the
upper amphitheater at Ouray, of the waterfall at Telluride, the Punch Bowl
at San Ysidro — even the prairies around Antonito — to Philistine eyes.”122
For many people, a summer sailing on Long Island Sound and lounging at
the family estate waited on by servants would be ideal. For Robert, he longed
for the landscape, the people, and the freedom of the West. Despite several
plans to avoid the summer on the Long Island estate, first through a feigned
recurrence of illness and then by trying to persuade his parents to accompany
him to New Mexico, Robert spent the summer of 1923 on the East Coast. He
admitted to Smith in a letter: “I fear that if I transported father and mother
to the midst of the desert and dropped them, I should jeopardize my puny
inheritance and to chaperone them to Los Piños would insure a new nervous
breakdown.”123 Although family and studies kept Robert in the East once he
entered Harvard, he often thought about New Mexico and corresponded with
mutual acquaintances about their lives and adventures there.
Because of his heavy load of courses, his outside reading, and self-imposed
haste to graduate in three years, Robert had only limited time for a social
life. His roommate, William Boyd, mentioned that he never saw Robert out
on a date. Another friend, Jeffries Wyman, admits that none of them had
much time for dating: “We were all too much in love with the problems of
philosophy and science and the arts and general intellectual life to be thinking
about girls.” For Wyman, Robert’s unease with people was also a hindrance:
“He found social adjustment very difficult, and I think he was often very
unhappy. . . I suppose he was lonely and felt he didn’t fit in well with the
human environment. . . We were young people falling in love with ideas right
and left and interested in people who gave us ideas, but there wasn’t the warmth
of human companionship perhaps.” For Robert and his cohort of friends at
Harvard, ideas and intellectual challenges excited them. They were drunk on
ideas and in love with discussing them.124
The professor who taught the thermodynamics course at Harvard, Percy
Bridgman, was a distinguished experimental physicist who changed Robert’s
life. Robert later said: “I can’t recall how it came over me that what I liked in

chemistry was very close to physics.”125 For him,

physics went to the heart of matter, even more
than chemistry did: “It was the study of order, of
regularity, of what makes matter harmonious and
what makes it work.”126 Physics appealed to the
philosopher in Oppenheimer more than chemistry
and even though he did not attend any courses in
physics his freshman year, he petitioned the physics
department to allow him to start taking graduate
level courses. He was permitted to jump over the
more basic physics’ courses, with one of the profes- Oppenheimer at Harvard
sors commenting: “Obviously, if he says he’s read
these books he’s a liar, but he should get a Ph.D. for knowing their titles.”
Despite his attraction to physics, in June 1925, Oppenheimer graduated
summa cum laude with a major in chemistry. Under his yearbook picture,
where a less modest person might have bragged about his achievements at
one of the most prestigious universities in the land, Robert simply wrote, “In
college three years as an undergraduate.”127
After Harvard, Oppenheimer wanted to attend the Cavendish Labora-
tory at Cambridge University in England. He later admitted: “I don’t even
know why I left Harvard, but I somehow felt that [Cambridge] was more
near the center.” With Nobel prize winner Sir Ernest Rutherford directing
Cavendish, Cambridge was perhaps the center of experimental physics. Pro-
fessor Bridgman wrote a letter of recommendation to Rutherford highlighting
Oppenheimer’s
perfectly prodigious power of assimilation. . . His weakness is on the exper-

imental side. His type of mind is analytical, rather than physical, and he is
not at home in the manipulations of the laboratory. . . It appears to me that
it is a bit of a gamble as to whether Oppenheimer will ever make any real
contributions of an important character, but if he does make good at all, I
believe he will be a very unusual success. . .

126 Goodchild, p. 16.
127 Smith and Weiner, pp. 28–30, 39; Goodchild, p. 16.
Rutherford was not impressed with Bridgman’s qualified endorsement and did
not accept him as one of his students; however, Rutherford did arrange for
Oppenheimer to work with another experimental physicist in his laboratory,
Nobel prize winner, J.J. Thomson.128
With his entrance to Cambridge finalized, Robert went to the mountains
of New Mexico before beginning the arduous work of pursuing a Ph.D. in
physics. This was his first time west since he had roamed the forested high
desert plateaus with Herbert Smith
in 1922. Although he had not vis-
ited for three years, he had kept in
touch with the friends he had made
in New Mexico. On one occasion,
he sent at considerable expense a
cake made in New York City for the
70th birthday celebration of Amado
Chaves, the patriarch of the family
that had adopted Oppenheimer and
Sangre de Cristo Mountains
Smith in 1922. On the cake was the
Chaves family crest. For this visit to the West, Robert had the rest of his family
with him. Frank stayed with him at a ranch near Cowles, and their parents
resided in the more luxurious Bishop’s Lodge in Santa Fe with side trips up to
the mountain retreat.
The visitors enjoyed a wide range of activities: trips to Native American
dances, carousing at the annual Santa Fe Fiesta, but most of all, riding horses
up to the high peaks that towered over the cabin at Cowles. Paul Horgan
visited the group and described one of their jaunts. They hired horses in Santa
Fe (which is 7,000 feet above sea level) to ride east over the Sangre de Cristo
Mountains and down into Cowles. As the crow flies, the distance is about
fifteen miles, but the peaks that they ascended rose to well over 10,000 feet
above sea level. As Horgan recalled: “It turned out to be a day-long venture,
full of merriment and nonsense as we rode. . . We hit the divide at the very top
of the mountain in a tremendous thunderstorm. . . immense, huge, pounding
rain. We sat under our horses for lunch and ate oranges, [and] were drenched. . .
I was looking at Robert [. . .] and all of a sudden I noticed his hair was standing
128 Smith and Weiner, p. 77; Goodchild, p. 16.

straight up [. . .] responding to the static.” They arrived at Cowles at 7 p.m.,

fortunate not to have been struck by lightning on the mountain. After this
idyllic romp in the Southwest, Oppenheimer headed across the Atlantic Ocean
to devote himself to experimental physics.129
Not all was idyllic in England. Robert complained in a letter to Francis
Fergusson: “I am having a pretty bad time. The lab work is a terrible bore, and
I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything. . . The
lectures are vile.” Robert discovered that he held little talent for the physical
preparations of slides or the setting up of scientific equipment. At one point,
he had to coat glass slides with a thin coating for an experiment. Whether
he could not get the coating to the appropriate thinness or that this activity
quickly bored him, he was dissatisfied with this work. He did enjoy the fresh
ideas and theories that spun around the labs and classrooms at Cambridge,
but his mental state deteriorated throughout the fall semester.130
Over the Christmas break, Robert and Francis Fergusson (who was in
England on a Rhodes Fellowship) traveled to Paris. They continued the practice
they had begun at the Ethical Culture School of arguing over ideas and personal
beliefs. This time though, Robert snapped. He jumped on Fergusson, grabbed
him by the neck, and tried to strangle him. Francis quickly pushed Robert
away, but this bizarre attack showed the stress that surfaced at Cambridge.
In an apologetic letter to Francis several weeks after the blow-up, Robert says
that he should come to Francis in “a hair shirt, with much fasting and show
and prayer,” to make up for the attack. Toward the end of the letter, Robert
alluded to his “inability to solder two copper wires together, which is probably
succeeding in getting me crazy.”131
Others noticed that Oppenheimer was in trouble mentally. John Edsall,
a classmate from Harvard who was also doing graduate work at Cambridge,
observed: “There was a tremendous amount of inner turmoil, in spite of
which [. . .] he kept doing a tremendous amount of work, thinking, reading,
discussing things, but obviously with a sense of great inner anxiety and alarm.”
Robert confided with Edsall that he was seeing a psychiatrist.132
129 Smith and Weiner, pp. 68, 80–81.

During the spring vacation, Oppenheimer joined Edsall and Jeffries

Wyman in a tour of Corsica and Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea. Although
Robert at times complained of feeling depressed, the three friends had a good
time exploring the island on foot, and Robert’s mood improved. On the
last night on Corsica before they were to go to Sardinia, Robert abruptly
announced that he had to return to Cambridge. When pressed for an expla-
nation, he said that he had left a poisoned apple on the desk of one of his
professors back in England and had to return to make sure that the man was
all right. Oppenheimer returned to England alone, to the great puzzlement
of his two friends who chalked it up to Robert’s inner turmoil. No professors
died from poisoning that spring, and perhaps Robert merely needed to correct
a mistake in some research that he had done for that professor.133
The holiday on Corsica did alleviate one
of Oppenheimer’s feelings of inadequacy. He
met a woman on the island. Little is known
of this mysterious relationship, but he wrote
years later: “The psychiatrist was a prelude to
what began for me in Corsica. . . What you
need to know is that it was not a mere love
affair, not a love affair at all, but love.”134
Back in England, Oppenheimer con-
fided to Edsall that he had been diagnosed with
dementia praecox, now known as schizophre-
nia. Before Fergusson returned to the States
that summer, he met Oppenheimer in front
of the psychiatrist’s office. Fergusson remem-
Oppenheimer in 1926
bers the meeting as a turning point in Robert’s
difficulties: “I [saw him] standing on the cor-
ner, waiting for me, with his hat on one side of his head, looking absolutely
weird. I joined him [. . .] and he walked at a terrific speed; when he walked
his feet turned out [. . .] and he sort of leaned forward, traveled at a terrific
clip. I asked him how it had been. He said [. . .] that the guy was too stupid
to follow him and that he knew more about his troubles than the [doctor]

did, which was probably true.” A sign of Oppenheimer’s intense intellect was
that he cured himself of his emotional turmoil. “There’s no doubt about it,”
Fergusson recalled, “Robert had this ability to bring himself up, to figure out
what his trouble was, and to deal with it.”135
Robert solved another difficulty that he grappled with that summer.
He decided to abandon experimental physics, leave Cambridge, and move
to Germany. The illustrious theoretical physicist Max Born had invited
Oppenheimer to join him at the University of Göttingen. Just as Cambridge
held a prestigious position in experimental physics, Göttingen was a world
famous center for theoretical physics. The shift suited Robert’s intellectual
strengths. He recalled: “By the time I decided to go to Göttingen, I had very
great misgivings about myself on all fronts, but I clearly was going to do theo-
retical physics if I could. . . I felt completely relieved of the responsibility to go
back into a laboratory. I hadn’t been good; I hadn’t done anybody any good,
and I hadn’t had any fun whatever; and here was something I felt just driven to
try.” The year since he had left Harvard had taken its toll on Oppenheimer. He
had changed from a chemist to an experimental physicist, and had abandoned
that for theoretical physics. For a brilliant person trying to find his way, the time
at Cambridge had not helped him, but he had high hopes for Göttingen.136
The fevered pitch of the work at Göttingen matched Oppenheimer’s
own inner fire and his work there helped advance quantum mechanics.
Oppenheimer made his mark among the professors and graduate students
at Göttingen, and others in the field began to notice him. With his Ph.D. in
hand, Oppenheimer sailed to the United States from Liverpool in July 1927.
He returned to New York, having made a name for himself at Göttingen. For
this 23-year-old, he had weathered the crises in England, found his calling in
Germany, and came back with knowledge and confidence. Physicists began to
read the articles by Robert Oppenheimer with interest, and schools courted
him to join their physics department. For someone who had his pick of pres-
tigious universities to teach at, Robert’s final choice showed the importance of
the West to his life. Robert chose to join the physics departments in a joint
appointment to the University of California at Berkeley and the California
Institute of Technology at Pasadena.

The impact of the West on Robert Oppenheimer is evident in both his

choice of where to teach and with his selection of Los Alamos during the war
as the site for an atomic weapons laboratory. He once said that two of the
loves of his life were physics and New Mexico. From his first visit in 1922,
New Mexico in particular, and the West in general, held a special influence
on Oppenheimer’s life. The impact of the West is seen in his letters as well as
his actions. It was from the West that Oppenheimer launched the Atomic Age
which transformed him and the 20th century.
GENERAL GROVES’ INDISPENSABLE

SCIENTIST
Robert S. Norris
Natural Resources Defense Council
General Groves tells us in his memoir, “Throughout the life of the project, vital
decisions were reached only after the most careful consideration and discussion
with the men I thought were able to offer the soundest advice. Generally, for
this operation, they were Oppenheimer, von Neumann, Penney, Parsons and
Ramsey.”137 I think it is correct to assume that these five are in ranked order
with Oppenheimer at the top. Of course, Groves did not lack for scientific or
technical advice. Groves’ formal scientific advisers were James B. Conant and
Richard C. Tolman. There were eight scientists who had already won Nobel
Prizes working on the Manhattan Project and more than a dozen others would
win the Prize after the war, one of them being Norman Ramsey.
Much has been written about the Oppenheimer–Groves relationship.138
At the center of the relationship is Groves’ decision, in the face of almost
unanimous advice to the contrary, to choose Oppenheimer to head the sci-
entific laboratory.139 Groves was cautioned that Oppenheimer had no pre-
vious administrative experience. He had never been a department head or a
137 Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can be Told, the Story of the Manhattan Project (Harper and Brothers,
NY, 1962), p. 343.
138 Robert S. Norris, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project’s
Indispensable Man (Steerforth Press, South Royalton, VT, 2002), pp. 239–243 and passim;
Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer,
Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller (Henry Holt & Company, NY, 2002).
139 “No one with whom I talked showed any great enthusiasm about Oppenheimer as a possible
director of the project.” Groves, Now It Can be Told, the Story of the Manhattan Project, p. 61.
105
dean. Luis Alvarez dismissed him by saying

that he couldn’t even run a hamburger stand.
Most thought that an experimental physicist
would be needed and Oppenheimer was a
theoretical physicist. Unlike the other leaders
of the fledgling project — Ernest Lawrence at
Berkeley, Arthur Compton at Chicago, and
Harold Urey at Columbia — Oppenheimer
had not won a Nobel Prize, a factor that might
cause less than full respect from his fellow
scientists. To many, his political involvement
with numerous leftist or communist causes
Groves and Oppenheimer at was an obvious disqualification.
Ground Zero
Groves was not convinced by any of
these arguments. He apparently saw things in Oppenheimer that others at
the time did not, qualities that would be essential to lead the scientific effort.
Groves was a superb judge of character; it was one of the secrets of his success.
He could size someone up quickly and determine whether the person was
competent and capable to do the job that he wanted done. Groves had a “fatal
weakness for good men,” was Oppenheimer’s immodest reply as to why the
general had chosen him.
By the fall of 1942, Oppenheimer was already deeply involved in explor-
ing the possibility of an atomic bomb. Throughout the previous year he had
been doing research on fast neutrons, calculating how much material might
be needed for a bomb and how efficient it might be. Under Compton’s direc-
tion, Gregory Breit headed the theoretical group exploring these questions
and Oppenheimer led the effort at Berkeley. After Breit resigned on 18 May
1942, Compton chose Oppenheimer as his replacement. He wasted no time
and convened a summer study conference at Berkeley in Le Conte Hall, in
July, to assess where the research stood. Oppenheimer referred to the group as
“our galaxy of luminaries.” The purpose of the conference, according to Robert
Serber, was “to discuss the whole state of the theory, to make an independent
assessment of whether the bomb was a reasonable possibility, and to discuss
how well everything was known.”140
140 Robert Serber, The Los Alamos Primer (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1992),
p. xxx. The nine who attended were: Oppenheimer, Serber, Hans Bethe, Emil Konopinski, John
van Vleck, Felix Bloch, Stanley Frankel, Eldred Nelson, and Edward Teller.
General Groves’ Indispensable Scientist 107
While there were uncertainties about such things as the cross sections
and the number of neutrons per fission, they felt they were not enough to make
the difference between success or failure.141 The gun-assembly bomb design
was a priority topic. At the time it was assumed that the gun design could use
highly enriched uranium and plutonium. A second method of assembling the
fissile material was also discussed. According to Serber,
[Richard] Tolman came to me one day and talked about implosion. . . We
discussed it that summer and wrote a memorandum on the subject. . . So
the story of Seth Neddermeyer the lone genius coming up with implosion
on his own is all hokum. . . It was Richard Tolman who brought the idea
into the project.142
The group raised the alarming prospect of whether an atomic explo-

sion might ignite the atmosphere. Oppenheimer was so concerned about this
potential apocalypse that he traveled all the way from Berkeley to northern
Michigan to see Arthur Compton at his summer cottage. As they walked
along the beach Oppenheimer informed Compton of the potential dangers.
Compton responded that the scientists would have to explore the matter fur-
ther to arrive at a more definitive answer. They would have to reach a “firm
and reliable conclusion” that it would not happen, otherwise the project would
have to cease and the bombs could not be made. As he said, “Better to accept
the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on
mankind!”143
In retrospect the range of topics covered at the Berkeley conference and
the confidence the participants had about their conclusions is notable. It would
provide a firm basis upon which to start at Los Alamos nine months later.
Oppenheimer came away from the conference with a better sense of what
the next steps must be.
[A] major change was called for in the work on the bomb itself. We needed
a central laboratory devoted wholly to this purpose, where people could talk
freely with each other, where theoretical ideas and experimental findings
141 Serber, Los Alamos Primer, p. xxx.

142 Serber, Los Alamos Primer, p. xxxii.
143 Arthur Holly Compton, Atomic Quest: A Personal Narrative (Oxford University Press, NY,
1956), p. 128. The issue lingered over the next three years. James Conant’s instantaneous
reaction at the Trinity explosion was that something had gone wrong and that the atmosphere
had ignited. James Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the
Nuclear Age (Alfred A. Knopf, NY, 1993), p. 760.
could affect each other, where the waste and frustration and error of the
many compartmentalized studies could be eliminated, where we could begin
to come to grips with chemical, metallurgical, engineering, and ordnance
problems that had so far received no consideration. We therefore sought to
establish this laboratory for a direct attack on all the problems inherent in
the most rapid possible development and production of atomic bombs.144
Oppenheimer was about to get his

wish. Groves and Oppenheimer first met
at a luncheon at President Robert Sproul’s
home, most likely on October 8. Groves
had been on the job a little over three
weeks and was visiting each of the univer-
sities where much of the research on the
bomb was taking place. He had already
General Leslie R. Groves made some big decisions and was ready
to make more if the right men and ideas
presented themselves. The two began to talk and they found that they had
similar ideas on how to proceed. Oppenheimer was well versed on where the
research stood; he knew the strengths of his fellow scientists and, as the above
quote demonstrates, was primed for an all out effort. To the General all of
these must have sounded like just what was needed. Perhaps he had found
his man.
Groves returned to Washington. A second meeting was arranged for the
following week, probably on the 15th or 16th. Groves had Oppenheimer meet
him in Chicago. With many issues needing further discussion, Groves asked
Oppenheimer to join him on the 20th Century Limited headed to New York.
With Col. Kenneth D. Nichols and Col. James C. Marshall, the four squeezed
into a tiny roomette and planned the laboratory as the train rolled eastward. On
October 19th, Oppenheimer came to Groves’ Washington office for further
discussions. Sometime over the next week or two, Groves made up his mind
about Oppenheimer.
What were those qualities that Groves discerned in Oppenheimer,
insights that he was able to perceive earlier than the others? Of course in time
144 U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1971), p. 12.
those qualities would reveal themselves and be recognized by almost everyone.

His colleague Victor Weisskopf spoke of Oppenheimer as
an unusually inspiring leader [who] had an extraordinary talent for grasping
the essential points of a problem, even in fields far removed from his special
training. His ability to be ready with the answer before one had finished
formulating the question helped him to be aware of everything interesting
that happened on the hill.145
[At Los Alamos], He did not direct from the head office. He was intellectually
and even physically present at each decisive step. He was present in the
laboratory or in the seminar rooms when a new effect was measured, when
a new idea was conceived. It was not that he contributed so many ideas
or suggestions; he did so sometimes, but his main influence came from
something else. It was his continuous and intense presence, which produced
a sense of direct participation in all of us; it created a unique atmosphere of
enthusiasm and challenge that pervaded the place throughout its time.146
The historians who wrote an official history of the project say that
Oppenheimer “understood scientists, their methods, their prejudices, their
temperaments. His professional stature, open manner, precision of thought,
and articulate yet temperate speech equipped him admirably for the task
ahead.”147
Oppenheimer was sensitive to the needs of others, able to anticipate
what it was they wanted. His charm and charisma had a powerful impact on
almost everyone who met him. In addition to his obvious brilliance, Groves
probably saw in the 38-year-old Oppenheimer a driving ambition. Groves
often chose relatively young men for certain jobs. He felt that younger men
were still hungry, full of energy and anxious to make a name for themselves as
they pursued their careers.
Oppenheimer’s formal responsibilities were detailed in a February
25, 1943 letter from Groves and Conant.148 The desired goal was clearly
145 Victor Weisskopf, The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist (Basic Books, NY, 1991),
pp. 132–133.
146 Victor F. Weisskopf, “The Los Alamos Years,” Physics Today, October 1967, p. 40.
147 Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939/1946: A History of the
United States Atomic Energy Commission (The Pennsylvania State University Press, University
Park, PA, 1962), p. 230.
148 David Hawkins, “Towards Trinity,” in Project Y: The Los Alamos Story, History of Modern
Physics, 1800–1950, Vol. 2 (Tomash Publishers and AIP, LA, 1983), pp. 495–497.
stated: “The laboratory will be concerned with the development and final
manufacture of an instrument of war.” The scientific director will be respon-
sible for achieving that goal “at the earliest possible date” while maintaining
secrecy “by the civilian personnel under his control as well as their families.”
He will rely on the advice of his scientific staff and keep Dr. Conant and
General Groves informed.
Groves organized the Manhattan Project largely using the Corps of Engi-
neers’ model, which decentralized responsibility to area offices in the field,
but kept direct links to them from headquarters. The headquarters of the
Manhattan Project was Groves’ office on the fifth floor of the New War
Building at 21st and Virginia in the Foggy Bottom section of Washington,
DC. From there he oversaw his vast empire with a surprisingly small staff.
He said he took as his model Gen. William T. Sherman, who during his
march to the sea limited his headquarters to what would fit into an escort
wagon.
The Manhattan Engineer District offices were located in Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, after initially being located in New York City, where it acquired
its name. The District Engineer was Col. Kenneth Nichols, whose involve-
ment in the project predated Groves.149 The two largest units that Nichols
administered were the Hanford Engineer Works and the Clinton Engi-
neer Works (Oak Ridge). In terms of cost and number of personnel, Los
Alamos was a small operation by comparison. The costs at Oak Ridge were
about $1.2 billion, at Hanford almost $400 million, and at Los Alamos
$74 million.150
From the outset Groves established dual lines of authority to Los Alamos:
one to the military commander and the second to the scientific director,
Oppenheimer. Both reported directly to Groves and did not go through the
district engineer’s office. With regard to Los Alamos, Groves assumed many
of the functions of the district engineer and the area engineer. The direct
lines permitted Groves (phone, Teletype, or frequent visits) to exercise broad
149 From 1929 to 1931 Nichols served under Groves in an engineer battalion sent to Nicaragua
to survey a prospective interoceanic ship canal.
150 In current dollars. Hewlett and Anderson, The New World, 723–724. In today’s dollars it
would be approximately $24 billion, $8 billion and $1.48 billion, respectively.
control over the bomb program and to intervene in the day-to-day operations
of the laboratory as needed. As he said,
With respect to Los Alamos, it was directly my responsibility in every way,

everything that happened. The orders were issued direct. We tried to keep
Nichols informed to such extent as was necessary. So from a practical stand-
point, though not on paper, the chain of command was direct from me to
Dr. Oppenheimer.151
And again,
Due to the magnitude of the District I retained personal direction of the Los
Alamos bomb laboratory and took personal charge of the development of the
weapon from the point where fissionable materials were supplied through
and including the military operations.152
By my count, after the initial trip to choose the site in November 1942,
Groves made two-dozen trips to Los Alamos between March 1943 and July
1945. Most of them were by train, traveling on the famous Santa Fe Super
Chief out of Chicago, but a few were by plane. The trips to Los Alamos
were often part of visits to other outposts of his empire. Oppenheimer came
to Washington a few times during this period and on several occasions met
Groves halfway in Chicago at the Met Lab or the area offices of the Corps of
Engineers. Tolman and Conant visited Los Alamos periodically and reported
to Groves on developments and problems. There was a steady correspondence
between Groves and Oppenheimer in the form of memos, letters, and reports
as well as scores of phone calls.
In short, the two worked together extremely closely, each believing the
other was essential to the realization of their common goal of developing
151 USAEC, In the Matter of JRO, pp. 171–172. According to Colonel Tyler’s notes of a visit
by the general, “General Groves reminded Col. Tyler that we are not in the chain of command
under Oak Ridge, that we should absolutely take no orders from Oak Ridge, but should only
look to them for whatever assistance that they can give us. At any time, when they give us orders
which are in conflict with our policy, or which will interfere with us in anyway, we are to let
the General know about it. We should send almost nothing through the District.” Notes Taken
During Visit of LRG, 7–9 February 1945, Folder 96, Manhattan Project Data, 1939–1948,
Box 6, Nichols Papers, Office of History, USACE.
152 LRG to Colonel T. D. Stamps, 21 August 1946, Folder 201, 1946, G.O.B., Box 2, Entry
7530C, Papers of LRG, RG 200, NARA.
and manufacturing an instrument of war to be used at the earliest possi-

ble date.153 Whereas Groves was struck by Oppenheimer’s many talents, so
too was Oppenheimer admiring of Groves’ abilities. One could not help but
be impressed by Groves’ decisiveness or the multiple responsibilities that he
assumed and carried out simultaneously, including fissile material production,
the creation of a military unit to drop the bomb, foreign intelligence activi-
ties, and international diplomatic negotiations. To Oppenheimer, Groves was,
among other things, an expediter without equal. Anything that he needed,
any piece of equipment, any scientist or expert was his for the asking. Groves
was the master bureaucrat who knew which levers to push in Washington to
get things done.
In their respective capacities Oppenheimer and Groves had to make
dozens of decisions everyday on matters large and small. For truly crucial
questions they worked together to solve some of the big issues.
Crash Implosion
For the first year or so there was a consensus among the scientists that both
highly enriched uranium and plutonium could be used in a gun-type assem-
bly bomb design, and the laboratory was organized to reflect that theory.
In March 1944 the first half-gram of plutonium from the X-10 reactor at
Oak Ridge arrived at Los Alamos. Previously, microscopic samples from the
Berkeley cyclotrons were used for analysis. Experiments on the X-10 reactor
sample suggested that it contained an isotope (Plutonium-240) that would
fission spontaneously. This meant that pre-detonation would occur, a fizzle
would result and that the gun method could not be used. It also meant that
153 Oppenheimer wrote to Groves on 28 October 1946, “It is time that I should write to you a
few words that have long needed saying, and that, as a matter of fact, I have promised to write
you when the time came. There is no need for me to add words of appreciation for what you
did during the war. Few men were in a better position to appreciate this than I. But the United
States knows that it is in your debt, and will forever remain so.” Groves responded on November
7, thanking him for his thoughtfulness, “I know that you know that the burden of responsibility
our work placed upon me during the war was in no small way eased by the knowledge that I
had your assistance in a key position. The confidence that I was always able to place not only
in your scientific knowledge but also in your sound judgment on other matters was a constant
source of comfort to me.” Folder 201, 1946, G.O.B., Box 2, Entry 7530C, Papers of LRG, RG
200, NARA.
just possibly the entire Hanford project might be for naught, a $400 million
investment wasted.
On July 17, 1944 Groves flew to Chicago to meet with Oppenheimer
who had come from Los Alamos. Conant and Compton were at the meeting
as was Enrico Fermi. As often happened during the Manhattan Project, a novel
solution emerged just when it was needed. The answer was implosion, an idea
first proposed two years earlier at the Berkeley summer conference but whose
time was not yet ripe. Its time was ripe now. Groves and Oppenheimer gave
implosion the highest priority and quickly reorganized the laboratory to turn
the theory into a real bomb.
Thermal Diffusion
Among Groves’ first decisions were to simultaneously pursue three paths to
produce fissile material for a bomb: two isotope separation methods to enrich
uranium and one method to produce plutonium. Two other ways of enriching
uranium, by thermal diffusion and centrifuges, had been considered but were
set aside. In the spring of 1944, Associate Director William S. “Deke” Parsons
brought back to Los Alamos news of the success that the Navy was having
with thermal diffusion. It dawned on Oppenheimer and others that if the
different methods were integrated rather than operating independently then
higher levels of enrichment might be achieved more quickly. The idea was
presented to Groves. He agreed and quickly built the S-50 thermal diffusion
plant at Oak Ridge. By the end of 1944, the slightly enriched uranium from
S-50 was sent to K-25 and from there it went to Y-12 where levels above
80 percent U235 were achieved for the Little Boy bomb.
Bomb Production and Little Boy’s Uranium

The Trinity test confirmed that the implosion design was sound. By that time
the three Hanford reactors were producing plutonium in predictable amounts.
Each Fat Man type bomb required six kilograms of plutonium. Groves had
ensured the early delivery of enough plutonium through what was known as the
“speed up” program. According to Dupont’s schedule of October 1944, there
would not have been enough plutonium available for the test until December
1945. This was totally unacceptable to Groves and he pressured Dupont to
speed up plutonium production through various means, including increasing

the power levels, pushing the uranium billets from the reactor more frequently,
and shortening the time the billets
remained in the cooling ponds.
By these methods the schedule
was advanced by six months and
Groves’ deadlines were met. The
first six kilograms were available
for the Trinity test and next six for
the initial combat bomb that was
dropped on Nagasaki.
The Hanford schedule per-
“The Gadget” at Trinity Site mitted Groves to predict with
some confidence how many bombs would be available over the next five
months. How many bombs was it going to take to force the Japanese to sur-
render? Would these new super-weapons be used in an American land invasion
in November, as George Marshall had wondered?154 No one knew for sure
and Groves saw as his job to keep producing bombs at a steady rate until the
war was over. In his memoir Groves said that he thought that two bombs were
probably enough to force the Japanese to surrender, though just after Trinity
he felt that four might be necessary.155
There was serious consideration by some at Los Alamos, even including
Oppenheimer, of using most or all of the sixty kilograms of the HEU from
Little Boy and combine it with plutonium to make composite cores of the two
materials. In this way more bombs could be built.156 On July 19, Oppenheimer
154 Barton J. Bernstein, “Eclipsed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Early Thinking about Tactical
Nuclear Weapons,” International Security 15(4) (Spring 1991) 149–173.
155 “It is necessary to drop the first Little Boy and the first Fat Man and probably a second one
in accordance with our original plans. It may be that as many as three of the latter in their best
present form may have to be dropped to conform to planned strategic operations.” LRG to
Oppenheimer, 19 July 1945, Top Secret, File F.B.I.
156 In a 1949 letter to Nichols, Groves comments on a misstatement that Robert Bacher had
made recently in testimony to Congress: “That was his reference to the fact that the improved
bomb used at Eniwetok had not been more than a gleam in someone’s eye. He apparently has
forgotten entirely Oppenheimer’s urgent recommendation to me soon after July 16th, 1945
that we go directly to this model, instead of the previously planned unit scheduled for the
second delivery.” LRG to Nichols, 13 July 1949, Folder N, Box 6, Entry 7530B, Papers of
LRG, RG 200, NARA. Groves was referring to Operation Sandstone in 1948, when composite
core designs were first tested.
cabled Groves inquiring about which path to pursue in bomb production over
the next three and a half months.
Groves told Oppenheimer
that they should meet in Chicago
to discuss the possible alternatives
and schedules. While the details of
the meeting remain classified it is
clear that Groves made the deci-
sion not to use Little Boy’s HEU to
help make more implosion bombs
with composite cores. Two bombs
turned out to be enough to force Ground Zero
Japan to surrender though a third
one was ready to leave Los Alamos. It would have been ready for use on
August 17 or 18 and a succession of others would have followed every ten days
after that.
The Manhattan Project is often held up as the paradigmatic case of how
to mobilize talent and resources to achieve a goal effectively and quickly. In
carrying out their responsibilities, the leadership manifested by Groves and
Oppenheimer helped to establish the methods and procedures that have come
to characterize successful large-scale collaborative efforts. One recent study
examined those features.157
Start with smart talented people and have them produce something
tangible as opposed to working on an abstraction or an idea. Young people are
preferred as they are normally more energetic, confident, and curious and are
more likely to work harder and longer. The undertaking has a better chance
of success if it is driven by moral purpose. Put this special population in an
isolated spot without any distractions. Living in Spartan conditions makes
work the focus. The tendency to escape into the work may result in ignoring
or not having the time to reflect on what is being produced. The cooperation of
the many parts is essential toward realizing the overall goal. Ensure that those
below have faith in their leaders, and make sure that the leaders have faith in
those below. Though Americans like to believe in the triumphant individual
that meets challenges and overcomes adversity, it is really a blend of individual
157 Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative
Collaboration (Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Reading, MA, 1997).
and collective effort that gets things accomplished. The leader finds greatness
in the group and also helps them find it in themselves.
Groves and Oppenheimer were two effective leaders who implemented
these procedures and produced a bomb in a little over one thousand days. For
that they were indispensable.
CHAPTER FOUR
Personal Reflections on Oppenheimer
117
118
OPPENHEIMER AS A TEACHER OF PHYSICS

AND PH.D. ADVISOR
Edward Gerjuoy
Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Pittsburgh
Introduction
I am delighted to have the opportunity to
speak at this Symposium on the subject of
Oppenheimer as a physics teacher and Ph.D.
advisor. Before proceeding any further, how-
ever, I must offer an apology and a caution.
The apology is to those members of my audi-
ence who are not physicists; I regret my inabil-
ity to find a way, satisfying to me, to deliver
this talk without referring to physicists and
physics topics that probably are unfamiliar
to non-physicists. The caution, to all mem-
bers of my audience, is that there almost
certainly are other still living students of Edward Gerjuoy
Oppenheimer’s who could speak more knowl-
edgeably on my subject than I can. I say this in all sincerity and without undue
modesty. For various reasons, some of which I shall address, Oppenheimer
supervised the Ph.D. researches of most of his other students more closely
than he supervised mine; also whereas several still extant Oppenheimer Ph.D.’s
accompanied him to Los Alamos, I did not. But, very likely largely because I
119
120 Personal Reflections on Oppenheimer
still am able to stand at a podium, here I am, and I will do my best to convey
what learning and doing physics under Oppenheimer’s tutelage was like.
Oppenheimer in the Classroom

I was enrolled as a graduate student in the Berkeley physics department from
August 1938 to January 1942. Actually when I arrived in Berkeley I knew
practically nothing about Oppenheimer beyond his name, even though I had
come to Berkeley intending to get my Ph.D. with him. But I immediately
became well acquainted with him via the introductory quantum mechanics
course he gave that I took in my first semester at Berkeley. I took his elec-
tromagnetic theory course in my second semester, and in succeeding years
took his advanced quantum mechanics and field theory courses. In each of
these courses he manifested the same distinctive teaching style, many aspects
of which merit detailed description.
• First, and most significantly, he obviously always came to class well prepared,
although he equally obviously could have winged it with ease had he not
devoted some advance time to planning what he intended to present. I
would not say anything nearly as complimentary about the professors who
gave any of the other non-Oppenheimer physics graduate courses I took
at Berkeley. At least one of these other professors usually came to class
unprepared and floundered at the board; the remainder were well prepared
but, in contrast to Oppenheimer, did not always have the course subject
matter at their fingertips and could be rattled by questions.
• Oppenheimer gave no final exams or any other tests. He did assign numer-
ous homework problems, however, many of which were highly instruc-
tive and non-routine. These homework problems always were graded by
Oppenheimer himself, again unlike the practice of a number of other Berke-
ley physics professors. I still have the homework solutions I submitted in
his advanced quantum mechanics course, with his handwritten comments
in the margin.
• He did not designate a textbook for any of his courses that I took, nor did he
assign readings or homework problems from any textbook. In fact he only
rarely explicitly cited any sources for the classroom material he presented.
If we students desired alternative or otherwise clarifying presentations, we
generally had to locate them on our own. I add that Oppenheimer’s failure
to assign a textbook in his electromagnetic theory course is revealing of his
Oppenheimer as a Teacher of Physics and Ph.D. Advisor 121
instructional bent. Much of the material he presented, though unquestion-

ably classical electromagnetic theory,158 unmistakably was intended to serve
as an introduction to the newly formulated, indeed still-developing-at-the-
time, quantum theory of radiation; such hypermodern material, though
standard textbook fare today,159 simply could not be found in any of the
then-available electromagnetic theory textbooks. His failure to assign text-
books for his quantum mechanics courses is not revealing and requires
no comment; at the time, barely a decade after Schrödinger’s formulation
of his wave equation, there weren’t any English language texts for him
to assign.160
• Each class hour literally was a lecture, delivered at high speed. The oral
delivery was accompanied by numerous equations written on the board at
correspondingly high speed, along with (when appropriate) equally rapidly
performed, rarely erroneous calculations. The speed was such that the only
way I possibly could grasp the material was to take hastily scribbled notes
as he spoke, from which scribblings I would prepare more complete notes
as soon as possible after the lecture, while it still was fresh in my mind;
there was no textbook to consult, I remember. I am quite certain that every
other serious student in those courses of Oppenheimer’s that I attended
did the same as I; indeed I remember numerous occasions when several
of us would argue at a blackboard about precisely what he had imparted.
Preparing these course notes took a lot of time; certainly I spent more time
on each of Oppenheimer’s courses than I did on any of the other courses
I took in graduate school. On the other hand, I undoubtedly learned far
more physics from each of Oppenheimer’s courses than I did from any of
the other graduate courses I took. I will add here that students who took
his introductory quantum mechanics, and electromagnetic theory courses
in 1940 or 1941 apparently were able to employ, as the equivalent of texts,
158 See the notes to Oppenheimer’s electromagnetic theory course, prepared c. 1939 by Shuichi
Kusaka.
159 See., e.g., J.D. Jackson, Classical Electrodynamics (Wiley, NY, 1962).
160 For e.g., L.I. Schiff, Quantum Mechanics (McGraw Hill, NY, 1968), which is compatible
with Oppenheimer’s approach to quantum mechanics (doubtless because Schiff absorbed that
approach during his 1938–40 tenure as Oppenheimer’s research associate), was not published
until after the end of World War II; H.S. Kramers, Quantum Mechanics (Dover, NY, 1964),
which Oppenheimer lauded in his advanced quantum mechanics course, was not translated
from German until 1964.
printed course notes prepared by several Ph.D. students of Oppenheimer’s,

but these course notes161 were not available when I took his courses.
• I have no memory of him ever initiating any sort of Socratic dialogue with
the class, nor do I recall him pausing in any calculation to ask the class for
suggestions on what to do next. In so stating I am not implying that he
would not take questions. If at any time during the lecture there was some-
thing a student didn’t understand, said student could feel free to interrupt
Oppenheimer with a question. I recall no indications that Oppenheimer
minded such interruptions; rather he generally would answer patiently
unless the question was manifestly stupid, in which event his response
was likely to be quite caustic. Unfortunately his patient answers often were
not illuminating; seemingly, Oppenheimer did not have the gift of putting
himself in a student’s place and recognizing that what was evident to him
might not be evident to the student. A student who persisted after receiving
Oppenheimer’s initially patient answer could expect to find himself on the
receiving end of the same sort of sarcasm that an obviously stupid question
would elicit. I also must say, however, that I never saw any indications that
he bore any grudges at students who momentarily had taxed his patience.
• I haven’t yet mentioned probably the most distinctive feature of his lec-
tures, namely his chain-smoking. He spoke quite rapidly, and puffed equally
rapidly. When one cigarette burned down to a fragment he no longer could
hold, he extinguished it and lit another almost in a single motion. I still
can visualize him in his characteristic blackboard pose, one hand grasping
a piece of chalk, the other hand dangling a cigarette, and his head wreathed
in a cloud of smoke. I add parenthetically that according to information
kindly furnished to me by the Berkeley physics department, of the 24 stu-
dents who received their Ph.D.’s under Oppenheimer’s direction during the
years 1931 through 1943 (see Appendix A162 ), as many as ten still were
161 B. Peters, “Notes on Quantum Mechanics. Physics 221, Oppenheimer 1939.” Also see
footnote 158 above.
162 Appendix A lists the names and thesis topics of every Oppenheimer student who earned
his/her Ph.D. at Berkeley. All but the first two of the names in Appendix A have been compiled
by Raymond T. Birge, History of the Physics Department (University of California, Berkeley,
CA), at Vol. 3, Appendix 13. Harvey Hall and John Franklin Carlson were omitted from Birge’s
compilation, apparently because he mistakenly had tabulated them as students of Professor
William Williams (see Birge, ibid., Vol. 4, Appendix 17), although Birge himself admits that
“Williams never had a single research paper to his credit”, ibid., Vol. 2, ch. 7, p. 10. Actually
Birge himself states that Carlson worked with Oppenheimer, ibid., Vol. 14, ch. 11, p. 25.
alive as of April 2004, though I have every reason to think that they all
are at least as old as I. I am including this fact in my talk so that Cindy
Kelly, President of the Atomic Heritage Foundation sponsoring this Sym-
posium, can recoup her expenses by conveying said fact, for an excessive
fee of course, to the tobacco industry as conclusive evidence that the health
risks of second-hand smoke have been vastly overrated.
• In my view these just-described aspects of Oppenheimer’s classroom teach-
ing style justify the following three conclusions, with which I shall close my
discussion of his classroom teaching:
First, although his primary interest as a physics professor surely was

research not teaching, he nevertheless took his classroom teaching
duties very seriously and performed conscientiously, even if sometimes
impatiently.
Second, he deserves credit for his painstaking efforts to construct un-
hackneyed courses that would lead students into productive physics
research as rapidly as their native talents would allow.
Third, there must have been many students who did not profit sig-
nificantly from Oppenheimer’s courses, whether because they lacked
the necessary native talent and/or had poor undergraduate training, or
merely because they were more interested in experimental physics than
in theoretical physics and did not want to put in the large amounts of
time required to adequately work up their class notes.
• This third conclusion is bolstered by the words of a quite talented physicist

who has been a good friend of mine ever since we were fellow graduate
students at Berkeley; wholly unlike me, however, he earned his Ph.D. in
experimental physics and then worked at Los Alamos during the war. My
friend has written (I quote):
I did take E&M from Oppie, but not QM. I did not like Oppenheimer
as a teacher. . . He was unaware, I think, of how little the students were
understanding what he was talking about. As you know, he never gave any
examinations and so he never really knew how much students had learned.
• I do not share my friend’s reaction to Oppenheimer’s classroom teaching,

but feel there could be some truth in what he says; in any event I believe it
is appropriate for you to hear not only my theoretical physicist conclusions,
but also this assessment by a competent non-theorist.
Oppenheimer’s Group
My classroom recollections of Oppenheimer, which I have just encapsulated
for you, actually are considerably less vivid than the recollections stemming
from my membership in his group of Ph.D. students. I joined Oppenheimer’s
group in roughly the spring of 1939. Joining his group was not a formal
procedure; as I recall I told him
I was interested in obtaining my
Ph.D. under his direction, and he
merely said very well, we would
see what I could do. He didn’t
immediately give me a research
problem and I didn’t expect him
to; I had been at Berkeley less
than two semesters and had not
Oppenheimer conducting a lecture even taken his advanced quan-
tum mechanics course. So at the time what joining his group required of
me was nothing more than my seeing to it that I, like all the other students
in his group, regularly showed up at the weekly theoretical physics seminar he
ran. One of the first things I learned from attending Oppenheimer’s seminar
was that he did not mind being called Oppie; although Oppenheimer could
be fearsome, he did not put on airs. I soon fell into the habit of thinking about
him as Oppie, have done so ever since, and therefore will take the easy route
of calling him Oppie in the remainder of this talk.
I will be saying a lot about Oppie’s seminar, where so much of my shaping
into a theoretical physicist took place. But first I should tell you about his group
and say much more than I already have about Oppie himself. Oppie’s group
was composed: (i) of the students working for their Ph.D.’s under his direction;
(ii) of various Ph.D. theorists, in residence at Berkeley for an extended period,
who either explicitly had come to work with Oppie or who at least wanted
to participate in his seminar. (I remember at least two theorists falling into
this category, one of them a native Australian who had earned his Ph.D. in
England.); and (iii) of his research associate, who already had his Ph.D. and
today probably would be called a postdoc. Oppie had a research associate, who
was supposed to help Oppie supervise his many students, every year I was at
Berkeley; his research associate when I joined his group was Leonard Schiff.
The number of students in Oppie’s group deserves special mention.

Oppie joined the Berkeley faculty in the fall of 1929 and remained at Berkeley
until the summer of 1942, when he was given a leave of absence to work on you-
know-what. Of the 24 students who earned their Ph.D.’s under his supervision
during this 13-year period (see Appendix A), fully 16 received their degrees
after 1939 (see Appendix A); moreover I recollect that every one of these 16
already was a fellow graduate student by the fall of 1940, when I published my
first paper. Recognizing that there also were some (though actually surprisingly
few) students of Oppie’s who never received their Ph.D.’s, the facts I have just
recited imply that during every one of the years I was in Berkeley, Oppie was
the Ph.D. thesis advisor of between 15 and 20 students, of whom a very large
fraction eventually did earn their Ph.D. degrees.
These are remarkable statistics. Even in the most halcyon days this
nation’s physics departments have enjoyed since World War II, with would-be
theorists flocking to U.S. graduate schools from the entire world, I doubt that
there have been more than a handful of professors in this country who at any
one time supervised as many ultimately successful theoretical physics Ph.D.
students as Oppie did. Equally remarkable is how varied were the topics of those
24 Ph.D. theses he supervised between 1929 and 1942 (see Appendix A); they
range from the interactions of electromagnetic radiation with matter (prob-
ably Oppie’s favorite subject), to atomic spectroscopy, to nuclear structure,
to neutron capture, to cosmic ray phenomena, to neutron stars and general
relativistic gravitational collapse. In their totality this collection of Ph.D. top-
ics, which spans just about all the subjects anyone would include under the
heading “Modern Theoretical Physics” during the 1930s and early ’40s, are
a testament to the breadth and depth of Oppie’s theoretical physics interests
and abilities.
An obvious question now comes to mind: how did Oppie manage to
secure so many students capable of earning a theoretical physics Ph.D.? The
answer to this question is twofold, but not profound. First, his students were
very good because before World War II popularized physics, the only students
who even dreamed of attempting a Ph.D. in theoretical physics were those
who had received very good grades in undergraduate physics; moreover those
grades were earned in that archaic era when grade inflation had not yet been
invented. The real question, therefore, is: why did so many of these very good
would-be theoretical physics Ph.D.’s who received their undergraduate degrees
in the decade or two before World War II come to Berkeley to work with
Oppie? Indeed I would guess, admittedly without having tried to examine any
relevant records, that the aforementioned 24 Oppenheimer Ph.D. recipients
were a quite significant fraction of all the theoretical physics Ph.D. degrees
earned in the U.S. during the years 1929 through 1943.
The answer to my second question stems from the fact that quantum
mechanics, the ultimate foundation for most modern theoretical physics inves-
tigations, was developed in Europe and remained essentially arcane until 1926,
when Schrödinger’s formulation of his famous equation made quantum the-
oretical research accessible to non-geniuses like myself. Oppie was one of
the very few American theoretical physicists who was both lucky enough to
have learned quantum mechanics in Europe right around 1926, and talented
enough to usably bring this learning back to the United States. He received
his Ph.D. in 1927 from the University of Göttingen, having studied with Max
Born, a very, very famous theoretical physicist; he joined the Berkeley physics
department only two years later. In the years between 1929 and 1935, say,
before so many great European physicists fled Hitler and began to establish
their own modern theoretical physics research groups in this country, students
who wanted to do research at the forefront of theoretical physics without
going abroad enrolled in the Berkeley physics department to work with Oppie
because there really were very few other professors in the United States actively
engaged in such research. In 1937, therefore, when I was asking my under-
graduate professors where I should go to do research in modern theoretical
physics, the only established group they could point me to was Oppie’s. That
he was located in Berkeley, about as far from my family in New York as I
possibly could get without leaving the United States made my forced decision
to work with him a very happy one.
This brings me to Oppie himself, whom I have yet to properly describe.
He was tall and absurdly thin. He also rarely was motionless; if nothing else
he would be puffing on his cigarette or waving it around as he talked. He was
well educated and well read; we all have heard of his ability to quote from
the original Sanskrit. His face was mobile; how he was reacting was no secret.
When I knew him he was between 35 and 40, and doubtless still at the peak of
his physical and mental powers. Those mental powers surely were prodigious.
He had a lightning quick mind, was tremendously verbal, and pretty obviously
always found the words to say exactly what he wanted to say; unfortunately
when he was talking physics these words did not always convey to his audience
what he hoped to convey, as I already have indicated.
His relations with his students, including me, were surprisingly informal.
For example, he allowed his students to drop into his office at any time to
consult physics books in his personal library which were not available in the
department library; I didn’t even have to knock. His office was deep, moderately
wide, and quite bare; except for the bookshelves and a blackboard running the
length of the room I recall only a single desk and chair, which I hardly ever
saw him using. He did not have any regular office hours. He could be moody
and often seemed to brood; if I found him alone in his office, or elsewhere for
that matter, his demeanor instantly made it apparent whether or not I should
dare speak to him. But if he was willing to talk, or already was speaking with
another student, I did not hesitate to ask him a question right then about
some physics matter bothering me; there was no need for an appointment.
Assuming one did catch him willing to be disturbed, this just-described easy
accessibility didn’t mean that I or any other graduate student thereupon, freely
would toss physics questions at him without forethought. As I also already
have indicated, his reaction to a question he deemed stupid tended to be very
caustic; one was likely to depart his company quite depressed.
Concerning Oppie’s knowledge and understanding of physics, Raymond
T. Birge, physics department chair during my years in Berkeley, has written:
I can testify, without I think fear of contradiction, that no matter what field
of physics was being discussed, Oppenheimer had more numerical facts in his
head and ready for instant application than did any experimental physicist
present, even including those working in the particular field being discussed.
Such remarkable knowledge of experimental facts, plus the ability to marshal
them effectively into theory, is in my opinion what constitutes genius.163
My own evaluation would not be quite as overwhelmed. While Oppie’s

knowledge of both theoretical and experimental physics undoubtedly was
extraordinary, I would judge that more than a handful of physicists in his
generation matched that knowledge; Enrico Fermi and Hans Bethe, both of
whom won Nobel Prizes, immediately come to mind. I also judge most physi-
cists would agree Fermi was a genius, but would not confer that appellation on
Bethe, despite Bethe’s remarkably prolific career; similarly I would not term
163 Birge, ibid., Vol. 3, ch. 9, p. 31.

Oppie a genius. Although he, together with his students, published a very
considerable number of important theoretical physics papers, his comprehen-
sive understanding of known physics, especially the startling ease with which
he rapidly grasped the newest developments, seemingly were not paralleled by
any completed research that deservedly should be termed unusually creative,
for example, worthy of the Nobel Prize.
It is possible that this just stated assessment of Oppie’s talents as a physi-
cist, which I believe is in keeping with conventional opinion, overcautiously
underestimates his creativity. Less than a month ago a publication of the
American Physical Society164 pointed out that in 1939 Oppie and his stu-
dent Hartland Snyder, a member with me of Oppie’s group, published a long
unnoticed paper showing that black holes could exist. This paper well might
have earned Oppie a Nobel Prize, had he lived long enough to see the existence
of black holes confirmed by astrophysical observations. In any event I want
to emphasize and re-emphasize that nothing I have said should be taken to
imply I have anything other than the greatest admiration of Oppie’s talents as a
physicist, in all aspects of those talents. In particular, speaking as a former stu-
dent of his, I fully endorse the statement made in a recent biographical sketch,
that as a professor at Berkeley Oppie “became arguably the most important
and certainly the most charismatic physics theorist in the United States.”165
Birge also writes: “Like all geniuses, Oppenheimer was very absent
minded.”166 As evidence for this asserted absentmindedness, Birge recounts
a story involving Oppie and Melba Phillips, the third student and the only
woman to earn a Ph.D. under Oppie’s direction (see Appendix A), with whom
Oppie wrote a quite famous paper on the physics of deuteron collisions with
nuclei. I must say that I never saw the slightest evidence of any absentmind-
edness in Oppie; quite the contrary in fact. Furthermore it is inconceivable
164 The Physical Review Focus, a monthly email publication of the American Physical Society,
wrote on June 1, 2004: “Had J. Robert Oppenheimer not led the U.S. effort to build the atomic
bomb, he might still have been remembered for conceiving of black holes. His 1939 Physical
Review paper (Phys. Rev. 56, 455), written with graduate student Hartland Snyder, described
how a star might collapse into an object so dense that not even light could escape its gravitational
clutches. The paper was hardly noticed until the 1960s, when astrophysicists began to seriously
consider that such extreme objects might exist.”
165 “Oppenheimer”, biographical article by B. Bederson, Encyclopedia of Science, Technology,
and Ethics (Macmillan, 2005).
166 Birge, ibid., Vol. 3, ch. 9, p. 31.
to me that any absent-minded theoretical physicist could have successfully

dealt with the myriad of details that unavoidably required Oppie’s handling
during his justly famed and universally admired wartime directorship of the
Los Alamos nuclear weapons project.
Nevertheless I will repeat here this story about Oppie and Phillips, which
dates from 1934, because it does shed a rather different light on Oppie than
is suggested by anything I have said so far, and because it still was being
snickered about when I joined Oppie’s group in 1939. Briefly, at 4:00 a.m.
one morning, a policeman patrolling the Berkeley hills found Melba in a panic,
alone in Oppie’s parked car. She said she and Oppie had been sitting there
for some time when, about two hours previously, Oppie had excused himself.
Oppie had not returned. The police looked for him everywhere in the vicinity
of the car, and then telephoned the Faculty Club where he was lodging at the
time. The Faculty Club found him in bed, asleep.
According to the newspa-
per stories about this incident (a
melange of which had been passed
on to me by some graduate student
whose name I forget, and which
I still possess in yellowed form),
Oppie told the police that after
leaving the car he simply had for-
gotten about Melba and had gone
home. The incident speaks for itself
and requires no comment from me.
I will say, however, that because
San Francisco Chronicle, 14 February 1934
Melba got her Ph.D. in 1933 (see
Appendix A), well before this abortive tryst occurred, Oppie cannot be accused
of having violated any of the modern precepts against intimacies between a
male professor and a female student working under his direction.
Oppie’s Seminar
Returning now to Oppie’s seminar, its regular attendees primarily were the
members of Oppie’s group, as well as Oppie himself of course. But there were
other more or less regular attendees during my years at Berkeley. Of such
attendees the most noteworthy was Stanford Professor Felix Bloch, a man of
just about Oppie’s age, who approximately once a month would drive in from
Palo Alto with a few of his students. That drive, which can be wearying even
now, was far more wearying then, before the freeways and — in my first months
at the seminar — even before the Bay Bridge; thus Bloch’s attendance also
was a testament to Oppie’s theoretical physics interests and abilities. Another
noteworthy attendee, primarily because I never was able to find out why she
attended, was the mysterious Madame Kokshoreva, who to my boyish eyes
seemed to be 50 years old. She was not a graduate student nor had any other
connection with the university to my knowledge; nor did I ever see the slightest
sign she had any inkling about any subject the seminar was discussing. In fact
I can’t remember her asking a question or even uttering a word other than
answering to her name. But she attended the seminar quite faithfully, and
Oppie never seemed to bat an eye when she entered or when she left.
The seminar was Oppie’s domain, his fiefdom. He selected the speakers;
except on rare occasions he totally dominated its proceedings. In complete
contrast to his classroom practices, Oppie almost never allowed himself to be
the seminar speaker. He preferred instead to sit in the front row and interrupt
the speaker with questions, except that not infrequently he became so exasper-
ated by the answers he was receiving that he shot to the front of the room and
took over the blackboard, thereupon morphing into his classroom lecturing
mode. Unless he formally had scheduled a speaker from outside his group,
Oppie’s first choice for speaker always was whomever prominent theoretical
physicist momentarily happened to be visiting the Berkeley physics depart-
ment; a scheduled talk by any member of Oppie’s group obviously could be
and would be postponed.
In those years the Berkeley cyclotron, which in 1939 earned its profes-
sor inventor Ernest Lawrence the Nobel Prize, was one of the seven physics
wonders of the world. Famous physicists, both experimentalists and theorists,
flocked to Berkeley from all corners of the globe; for example, to name just
two such visitors who had made important theoretical physics contributions:
1938 Nobelist Enrico Fermi gave an extended series of lectures in 1940, and
1945 Nobelist Wolfgang Pauli visited in 1941. Oppie more often than not
managed to convince such visiting theorist-targets-of-opportunity to speak
in his seminar. The results were exciting and instructive to all of us student
attendees; we were able to hear about research at the forefront of theoretical
physics right from the horse’s mouth, and (perhaps even more importantly)
could see for ourselves that not all great theoretical physicists were cut from
Oppie’s mold.
Of course Oppie wasn’t able to secure visiting target-of-opportunity
speakers every week; prearranged seminar speakers from outside Berkeley came
not infrequently, but also not frequently. All in all I would judge that well over
half the time the seminars were delivered by members of his group. Students
would speak on research they had completed and were about to write up;
occasionally Oppie would assign someone to talk on a published paper he
thought worth discussing. When student speakers in such categories could
not be mustered, the duty of speaking would fall back on Oppie’s research
associate. It was Oppie’s practice each year to assign his research associate a
broad subject, almost the equivalent of a course, which said associate would
speak on in a continuing fashion, whenever no other speakers were available;
in this fashion, Oppie and the other seminar attendees, whether students like
myself or Bloch from Stanford, could be sure that a speaker of some sort,
whether visitor, student or research associate, always would show up.
I already have said that tossing questions at the speaker was Oppie’s
preferred seminar role. He fell into this role with visiting and home-grown
speakers alike. Especially with home-grown speakers, though by no means
necessarily, if a question was not answered to Oppie’s satisfaction he would
furnish his own answer; moreover as I said he was not averse to brushing the
speaker aside and going up to the blackboard if he felt the occasion warranted
the intrusion. In this question-answering mode he did not distinguish between
his own questions and the questions of others, nor did he treat Bloch’s questions
any differently than those from any other seminar attendee. Unfortunately,
much as in his classroom performances, his answers often did not wholly
clarify the issues at hand, even though his seminar attendees obviously were
much more sophisticated theorists than the students in his courses. I well
remember the many occasions when, after one of Oppie’s answers, the cry,
“But Oppenheimer! . . . ,” uttered in an unmistakably German accent, welled
up from Bloch. We students in Oppie’s group, though no less baffled than
Bloch by what Oppie had said, reveled in Bloch’s discomfiture and were fond
of saying that Bloch was Oppie’s most advanced student. It was not until after
the war, when I had begun to teach physics myself, that I realized Bloch, though
slow thinking in comparison to Oppie’s superfast mind, was a distinguished
physicist who otherwise hardly would have had a professorship at Stanford.

Indeed Bloch won a Nobel Prize in 1952.
As I recall, Oppie’s seminar performances avoided disconcerting any of
his visiting speakers; Oppie basically was a polite man, and I judge he took
care not to be impolite to these visitors, who after all were doing him a favor.
Unfortunately I can’t say the same about his questioning of his students when
they spoke. With them his questioning was fierce, often cruelly so. I went
through a couple of speaking assignments without being too badly scathed;
many of my fellow students were not as lucky. I want to emphasize here that
I do not believe Oppie was in any way sadistic; on the contrary my overall
assessment of his behavior leads me to think he legitimately could be termed
kindhearted. Furthermore I feel confident that the questions Oppie put to
his student speakers were designed not to embarrass but to elucidate, more
often for the benefit of the audience than for himself. In fact I wouldn’t be
surprised if Oppie’s persistent questioning was nothing more than an automatic
attempt to remedy the discomfort he clearly felt when hearing any theoretical
physics statements he thought wrong or even imprecise; it could have been
like scratching an itch. Sadly, however, Oppie appears to have somehow lacked
the empathy that would cause him to draw back, once his previous questions
had reshaped the student speaker into a quivering hulk incapable of profiting
from, much less answering, any further questions.
Nor, when Oppie’s research associate Leonard Schiff gave a seminar, did
Oppie treat Schiff any more kindly than he treated his student speakers. Schiff
had been assigned the task of taking the group through a famed treatise on the
quantum theory of collisions between charged particles, published some years
earlier by two British theoretical physicists named Mott and Massey.167 The
contents of this treatise, especially the mathematics it employed, are standard
fare today, but they were far from standard when Schiff was working his way
through the book. So it was quite understandable that Schiff might not fully
understand the mathematical properties and physical implications of all the
equations from Mott and Massey he would reproduce on the board during
any one seminar. Nevertheless Oppie, who perfectly legitimately systematically
asked Schiff searching questions about each and every equation Schiff wrote
down, couldn’t seem to halt his questioning and let Schiff go on to another
167 N.F. Mott and H.S.W. Massey, The Theory of Atomic Collisions (Oxford, 1933).
equation when Schiff ’s answers clearly showed that he needed more time to
work his way through the equation Oppie was asking about. On more than
a few occasions Oppie had Schiff, who was a gentle soul, visibly on the verge
of tears. Much as was the case with Bloch, Oppie’s treatment of Schiff left
his students with no real appreciation of Schiff ’s talents. Certainly we would
not have predicted that Schiff would have a distinguished career, including
chairing the Stanford physics department.
I cannot refrain from contrasting Oppie’s treatment of Schiff during
Schiff ’s seminars with Oppie’s corresponding treatment of Julian Schwinger,
who in 1940 replaced Schiff as Oppie’s research associate. All Oppie’s students,
including myself, were eagerly anticipating Julian’s first seminar. But whereas
the other students were wondering how long it would take Julian to shrivel
under Oppie’s questioning, I was wondering how Oppie would react to Julian’s
refusal to shrivel. These differing wonderments stemmed from the fact that I,
unlike every one of Oppie’s other students, had been exposed to Julian’s talents
during my undergraduate years at City College in New York. I do consider
Julian, who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for developing the very important
modern formulation of quantum electrodynamics, to have been a genius. In
fact my greatest claim to fame may be that when Julian and I were in the
same mechanics class in City College I got an A whereas he only earned a B, I
guess because he angered the instructor by getting 100% in all the exams even
though he never attended the regular class sessions after the first week.
Anyway Julian’s first seminar, on a subject I no longer remember, went
exactly as I expected, but totally astonished every other student of Oppie’s.
Namely Julian started talking and very soon Oppie, in accordance with his
usual practice, asked Julian a question, which Julian answered. Another ques-
tion followed very shortly thereafter, and Julian answered. More questions
came; more questions were answered. After about a dozen questions, answered
by Julian with no visible sign of distress whatsoever, Oppie stopped firing ques-
tions and let him finish his seminar essentially without further interruption.
Nor did he ever again unduly interrupt during any succeeding seminar of
Julian’s.
I stress that these contrasting treatments of Schiff and Schwinger should
not be taken to imply that Oppie stopped asking Schwinger questions because
he saw he couldn’t bully Schwinger the way he had bullied Schiff. In the first
place I do not believe Oppie was trying to bully Schiff; he just lacked the
empathy to recognize how badly he was distressing Schiff, as I already have

explained. Furthermore Schwinger, though perhaps not as gentle as Schiff,
was not a specially tough soul; if Oppie had wanted to bully Schwinger, he
easily could have found a way. Oppie stopped asking Schwinger questions
because it became apparent, in that first seminar and in Oppie’s subsequent
conversations with Julian, that Julian always knew what he was talking about
and would sufficiently discuss any subtleties inherent in his seminar subject
without having to be prodded by Oppie.
Closing Remarks
The foregoing said, it’s time to start winding down this talk. I would have liked
to summarize for you what and how Oppie’s Ph.D. students learned from him
outside his courses, but I have had to abandon this endeavor as beyond my
powers. A major part of my difficulty is that, as I intimated at the very outset,
Oppie did not closely supervise my Ph.D. research; in fact it would be quite
accurate to assert that he hardly supervised my research at all. I need not go
into a lot of details on this point. Suffice it to say that my thesis consisted
of three completed papers, the first two written by me alone and the third a
joint paper with Schwinger. Each of the first two papers arose out of problems
initiated by experimentalists, who approached Oppie asking whether their
data were consistent with theory. In each of these cases Oppie, after assigning
me the problem of determining whether or not the experimental results were
predictable, told me that I first should bring any questions I had to Schiff; I
should feel free to bother Oppie only if Schiff couldn’t help.
As it happened I didn’t need to bother Oppie, nor did I have to bother
Schiff very much. Moreover neither problem was at the forefront of theoretical
physics, as I freely admit; also the data turned out to be quite predictable,
as should have been expected. Consequently Oppie showed little interest in
these researches and never asked me to brief him on how I was getting along;
nor did he do more than barely skim the calculations I performed and the
prepublication drafts of the papers I wrote. Here Oppie was willing to rely on
Schiff, with only a bare minimum of his own checking; Schiff had carefully
looked at my calculations and drafts, of course. I never even discussed with
Oppie any aspects of the research I carried out for my third paper, the one I
wrote with Schwinger; by this time Oppie completely trusted Julian. I did have
the benefit of working very closely with Schwinger on my third thesis problem;
in fact we toiled together night after night into the wee hours, performing all
the required calculations in each other’s company, sometimes independently,
sometimes jointly at the blackboard. But working closely with Julian need not
have been, and probably wasn’t, anything like working closely with Oppie.
With the bulk of his students,
however, Oppie was fairly closely
involved with their Ph.D. researches.
He was interested in many of the prob-
lems they were working on, and in not
a few instances himself worked on the
problems alongside his students, much
as Julian worked alongside me. Those
students therefore had a much better
opportunity than I to see how Oppie’s
mind worked and to savor his approach
to physics. Consequently I feel I must
confine myself to imparting the one all-
important benefit I believe all Oppie’s
Ph.D. students gained from their asso- J. Robert Oppenheimer
ciation with him whether or not they
worked closely with him, a benefit they might not have derived from a differ-
ent Ph.D. advisor, even a very famous one; but before embarking on even this
much less ambitious venture I have to renew the caution with which I started
this talk.
Obviously all of us who earned our Ph.D.’s with Oppie learned a great
deal of modern physics, in the courses we took from him and while working
on the research problems he assigned. Even if he wasn’t terribly interested in
the outcomes of some of those researches, the problems all were nontrivial
and fully involved modern physics; any student who completed one of those
assigned research problems was transformed thereby, into a significantly more
competent theoretical physicist than when he had begun the work. Please
recognize, however, that what I have just said is in no way different from what
any Ph.D. student of any of our great modern theoretical physicists would be
expected to say. For instance, sticking with names I already have mentioned in
this talk, I would expect that in discussing their mentors my words would be
echoed by Fermi’s students, by Bethe’s, by the students of Max Born including

Oppie himself, and by Schwinger’s students, who eventually comprised 73
Ph.D.’s including three future Nobel Laureates.168
Even if it is true that Oppie’s own published contributions to physics did
not quite match those of the physicists I have just named, terming Oppie a
mentor equal to any of them is a high tribute. Although I cannot really know,
of course, I have every reason to believe the tribute is well deserved. But I also
have every reason to believe Oppie’s mentoring of his Ph.D. students deserves
an additional tribute, one that I think probably should not be as readily shared
with his great contemporaries, although again I cannot really know. I feel Oppie
did his physics, talked about his physics, lived his physics, with an unusual
passion, which had to inspire his students; in any event he sure inspired me.
To give you just one of many possible illustrations, it bothered him, it tore
at him, that he didn’t understand how the pi mesons which in nuclei were
so strongly interacting penetrated the earth’s atmosphere so readily. Maybe he
should have hit upon the idea that the mesons reaching the earth’s surface
really weren’t pi mesons, but instead were other weakly interacting mesons —
those we now term mu mesons; but since he hadn’t conceived of mu mesons
he couldn’t stop talking about the anomaly that atmospheric penetration by pi
mesons represented, in seminar after seminar and in less formal conversations
with groups of his students.
Thus, and I now am concluding what I have to say, despite Oppie’s
sometimes overly ferocious questioning, despite the sarcasms that Oppie really
should have suppressed, we his students respected him and felt indebted to
him; knowing that Oppie so obviously passionately loved doing physics, that
he so obviously always had physics in the forefront of his mind, helped us
believe that becoming a competent theoretical physicist was worth the fairly
enormous effort required, especially in those prewar economically depressed
days when the word physics had no popular resonance and jobs for theorists
were very hard to come by. And, for imbuing me with this belief, I respect and
feel indebted to him still.
168 See Jagdish Mehta and Kimball A. Milton, Climbing the Mountain. The Scientific Biography
of Julian Schwinger (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Ph.D. Candidates Supervised by Robert Oppenheimer with date

of Final Examination and Title of Thesis
(Compiled from Raymond T. Birge’s History of the Physics Department, Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, CA.)
1. Harvey Hall, August 17, 1931

The Relativistic Theory of the Photoelectric Effect
2. John Franklin Carlson, April 30, 1932
The Energy Losses of Fast Particles
3. Melba N. Phillips, May 6, 1933
Problems in the Spectra of the Alkalis:
A. Photo-Ionization Probabilities in Atomic Potassium
B. Theoretical Considerations on the Inversion of Doublets in
Alkali-like Spectra
4. Arnold T. Nordsieck, May 11, 1935
The Scattering of Radiation by an Electric Field
5. Glen D. Camp, May 14, 1935
Is a Relativistic Non-Conservative Theory of Mechanics Possible?
6. Willis E. Lamb, Jr., April 18, 1938
I. On the Capture of Slow Neutrons in Hydrogenous Substances
II. On the Electromagnetic Properties of Nuclear Systems
7. Samuel B. Batdorf, April 23, 1938
An Investigation into the Penetrating Possibilities of Charged Particles
of Arbitrary Magnetic Moment
8. Sidney M. Dancoff, September 13, 1939
Three Problems in Quantum Mechanics:
A. Virtual State of He5 and Meson Forces
B. On Radiative Corrections for Electron Scattering
C. The Calculation of Internal Conversion Coefficients
9. George M. Volkoff, February 27, 1940
I. The Equilibrium of Massive Neutron Cores
II. The Oppenheimer–Phillips Process
10. Philip Morrison, April 23, 1940

Three Problems in Atomic Electrodynamics:
A. Internal Conversion of Gamma Rays of Arbitrary Multipole
Order
B. Internal Scattering of Gamma Rays
C. Energy Fluctuations in the Electromagnetic Field
11. Hartland S. Snyder, April 25, 1940
Five Problems:
A. Cascade Theory
B. Quadratic Zeeman Effect
C. Gravitational Collapse
D. Mesotron Collisions
E. Energy Levels of Fields
12. Joseph M. Keller, September 13, 1940
Precise Determination of the Fine Structure Constant from X-Ray Spin
Doublet Splitting
13. Robert F. Christy, April 22, 1941
Cosmic-Ray Burst Production and the Spin of the Mesotron
14. Eugene P. Cooper, August 25, 1941
Three Problems in Quantum Theory:
A. Internal Scattering of Gamma-Rays
B. The Ground States of Be10 and C10
C. On the Separation of Nuclear Isomers
15. Shuichi Kusaka, February 3, 1942
Studies on the Spin of Elementary Particles:
A. Electric Quadrupole Moment of the Deuteron
B. The Interaction of Gamma-Rays with Mesotrons
C. Burst Production of Mesotrons
D. Beta-Decay with Neutrino of Spin 3/2
E. Quantization of the Wave Field for Particles with Higher Spin
16. Richard R. Dempster, March 10, 1942
I. The Calculation of Transition Probabilities for Photoionization of
Sodium from the 3P-State
II. The Influence of Fluorescence upon the Central Intensities of the

Solar D-lines
17. Roy Thomas, April 13, 1942
Three Problems in Quantum Mechanics:
A. Internal Pair Production in Radium C
B. Burst Production by Mesotrons of Spin One-Half and Zero
Magnetic Moment
C. High Energy Proton–Deuteron Scattering
18. Eldred C. Nelson, April 24, 1942
Mesotrons and Nuclei:
A. Internal Conversion of Gamma-Radiation in the L. Shell
B. Isomeric Silver and the Weizsäcker Theory
C. Note on the Neher–Stever Experiment
D. The Ground States of Be10 and C10
E. Pseudoscalar Mesotron Theory of Beta-Decay
19. Bernard Peters, May 8, 1942
A. Deuteron Disintegration by Electrons
B. Scattering of Mesotrons of Spin 1/2
20. Edward Gerjuoy, May, 1942
Problems in Atomic and Nuclear Spectroscopy:
A. On the Angular Distribution in the Reaction F19(p, alpha)
B. Interference in the Zeeman Effect of Forbidden Lines
C. Tensor Spin-Orbit Forces in H3 and He4
21. Stanley P. Frankel, July 20, 1942
Three Problems in Theoretical Physics (the first of the classified research
project theses)
22. Chaim Richman, April 13, 1943
A Problem in Theoretical Physics (classified)
23. Joseph W. Weinberg, June 4, 1943
Studies in the Quantum Field Theory of Elementary Particles
24. David J. Bohm, June 5, 1943
Theoretical Investigation of Scattering of Various Nuclear Particles
(classified)
25. Leslie L. Foldy, June 15, 1948

Four Studies in Theoretical Physics:
A. The Theory of the Synchrotron
B. Theory of the Synchro-Cyclotron
C. On the Meson Theory of Nuclear Forces
D. The Energy–Momentum Relation for Particles Interacting with
Fields
26. Harold W. Lewis, June 16, 1948
Three Problems in Theoretical Physics:
A. The Multiple Production of Mesons
B. On the Reactive Terms in Quantum Electrodynamics
C. On the Analysis of Extensive Cosmic Ray Shower Data
27. Siegfried A. Wouthuysen, June 16, 1948
Self-Energy and Covariance in Field Theory
REMEMBERING OPJE: TEACHER,

MENTOR, SCIENTIST AND FRIEND
David Pines
Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter, University of California Office
of the President, Oakland, California
I would like to thank Cindy for this opportunity to pay

tribute to Robert Oppenheimer as a teacher, mentor,
scientist, and friend. My talk will be a series of snap-
shots of Opje (the Dutch spelling of the nickname he
was given in Leiden) and his wife, Kitty, as I knew them
in Berkeley, Princeton, and Paris. Through these, I’ll
try to give you a sense of Opje and his extraordinary
capacity as a teacher. He was a truly charismatic per-
son and communicator, a caring and inspiring mentor,
a fascinating and witty friend, and a great scientist. I David Pines
hope these vignettes will complement the portrait that has emerged through
the many fine talks we have heard today.
I was an undergraduate and one-semester graduate student at Berkeley
during the war, from August, 1941 to June, 1944, before going off for two
years in the Navy. When I became a physics major in 1943, through those
of his students on the Berkeley faculty who were still around (Joe Weinberg,
whose lectures on quantum theory led me to think about becoming a the-
oretical physicist, and Dave Bohm, who gave guest lectures on plasmas in
Weinberg’s class on electricity and magnetism), I became acquainted with the
Oppenheimer legend. Although he was not present and no one would say
exactly where he was, he was a dominant figure with whom you could only
141
be eager to study theoretical physics in Berkeley. There were numerous stories

about him, some of which Ed Gerjuoy has recounted here today. His students
and postdocs did not simply worship him, they did their best to imitate him.
Thus we were told that Julian Schwinger, who was comparatively pudgy and
short, tried to look, walk, and talk like Robert Oppenheimer, who was tall and
thin and elegant. Julian even went so far as to wear a pork pie hat.
Opje in person in 1946 did not disappoint. He was also not exactly
comfortable at this point with the fame that came his way. That fall when I
returned to graduate work at Berkeley, I was introduced to him on the stairs
going into LeConte Hall, the physics building. Just then, several people who
were walking by stopped and stared. At which point, he turned on them and
said, “You look funny, too.”
Opje’s course on quantum mechanics was justly regarded as a classic. His
lectures were inspiring and, as one listened to them, seemed very deep, yet also
clear. Looking back, I cannot imagine a better way to become acquainted with
its triumphs, intricacies, and paradoxes.. Opje’s course was derived in no small
part from Pauli’s article on quantum mechanics in the Handbuch der Physik.
His lectures were challenging, refined, and rich in texture. We now possess not
one, but two written accounts of them in the form of excellent books written
by his students Leonard Schiff and David Bohm, Although both books were
based on those lectures, they could not be more different. Bohm captures the
philosophy and the poetry; Schiff the formalism. And yet each caught a sense
of what Oppenheimer tried to convey.
He always began the lectures with an account of the famous exchange
between Bohr and Einstein in 1927 at the Solvay Congress. He made that
seem so simple and lucid but also so strange that he conveyed the essence of
quantum mechanics. If you like, all the rest were details.
He was by then a very popular lecturer, his course a must for all graduate
students in physics. Part of it was his extraordinary personae — his piercing
blue eyes and striking physical appearance, his way with language and cigarettes
or pipe. He had an instinct for the perfect phrase. Time magazine did a cover
story on him about that time; it included his definition of what theoretical
physics is — “What we don’t know, we explain to one another.” At the time
I thought that was a casual remark. Through the years, I have realized that it
encapsulates what theoretical physics is all about.
Remembering Opje: Teacher, Scientist and Friend 143
His parties were memorable. Although I was only a beginning graduate

student I was fortunate to have been among those present at a number of them
during 1946–47, as Opje and Kitty kept up the tradition established by Opje
before the war, of inviting a mixture of the very young and the more senior of
his colleagues and friends.
One aspect of their parties was the unusual ratio of drink-to-food. It was
so out of proportion that at an Oppenheimer cocktail party you could easily
consume anywhere from four to ten martinis while having only a little bit to
nibble on from time to time. The result was predictable; most of his guests
were thoroughly soused by the time the party was well under way.
Kitty had a fondness for formal parties as well. So for winter solstice
that year, she organized a formal party on December 21, to greet Opje on his
return from a trip to Washington. That might have been the only time after
the war that his friends Ernest Lawrence and Haakon Chevalier were in the
same room, both looking quite elegant in their tuxes.
In the spring of 1947, his students in quantum mechanics realized he was
going to give a lecture on his birthday. So we organized a minor celebration,
presenting a cake to him at the start of the class. What I remember is thinking
how really old he was, at all of forty three. But from the perspective of someone
twenty plus years younger, that seemed very old indeed.
Opje went to Princeton as Director of the Institute for Advanced Study
in the fall of 1947. At his invitation I followed along, transferring to Princeton
University with the intention on both our parts that I would do a thesis with
him. Once there, it became evident rather quickly that his days as a supervisor
of Ph.D. theses were over. As the principal advisor to our government on
atomic weapons and the future of atomic energy, he was away too much, and
too preoccupied with his governmental responsibilities, to undertake thesis
supervision.
But we still kept in close touch, as I would be invited to parties at Olden
Manor, come to the Institute to hear great physicists lecture there, or see him
at the colloquium that he, Rabi, and Wigner jointly organized. In June of
1948, he went back to Berkeley to give his famous course on quantum theory
in their summer session. He knew that I was getting married just before the
summer session began, and that I wanted to take part in his seminar as well.
So he arranged for me to be his reader for the course.. Ed Gerjuoy has it quite
right about that course. Namely, that after you listened to a lecture, you went
home and spent hours writing it up, try to put in order the almost bewildering
display of facts arising out of deep knowledge that was thrown your way. I
had done that regularly during his lectures in 1946–47. Apparently he noticed
this, because just before he gave his first lecture that summer in Berkeley in
1948, he said to me, “David, do you still have a copy of your notes on my
lectures?” I said, “Yes,” and that notebook containing my effort to transcribe
his lectures was what he lectured from for the rest of the summer. It was a
humbling experience but quite an inspiring one.
He was also an elegant and courtly individual. Shortly after we arrived
that summer, I was walking to LeConte with Suzy, my brand new wife. We
encountered Opje as he was returning from lunch. He looked at us, took off
his hat, made a bow, kissed Suzy’s hand and said to us, “This must be the new
Mrs. Pines.” As you can imagine, she was more than swept off her feet.
Later that summer, the two of us were invited to a family lunch. We
started lunch with martinis, of course, at about 12:30 PM. We left about 5 PM.
Of course I would love to be able to recall the details of the conversation but
for the most part they are a blur. I remembered afterwards that this day was
the third anniversary of the Trinity test, but not a word of that was spoken
during the lunch.
Let me skip forward ten years to the spring of 1958, when the
Oppenheimers made their first trip abroad after the security hearing and all
of its terrible consequences for them. They arrived in Paris where he was to
give a few lectures and be based at the École Normale. Opje was treated as a
hero by the French. His appearance in Paris was quite comparable to that of a
major rock star and he lectured to packed halls. Paris Match followed his every
move. Cartier-Bresson appeared one morning at the École Normale to take
photographs and a group of us were rounded up to be in the series he made
of Oppenheimer in his office.
One day, Suzy and I took Opje and Kitty to a quite grand restaurant for
lunch. As we were beginning to place our orders, the owner of the restaurant
came over and asked if she could please have his autograph. A story they told
us over lunch is one of our favorite Oppenheimer stories. A mutual friend of
theirs knew Marlene Dietrich, and knew that she had written a little alphabet
book in which she said, “O is for Oppenheimer, I wish I knew him.” The
friend arranged for them to meet and the evening came when Dietrich was to
come to the Oppenheimers’ apartment. About half an hour before she was due
to arrive, Opje said to Kitty, “I think I should go downstairs just in case she
gets lost.” When he went downstairs, he found her pacing the street, waiting
to come up. They had a wonderful time.
As a gesture of reconciliation on the part of our government and in
recognition of Opje’s extraordinary contributions during and after the War,
Oppenheimer was awarded the Fermi prize of the Atomic Energy Commission
in 1963. The presentation was to have been made by President Kennedy, but
the timing was such that it took place just after his assassination, with Lyndon
Johnson presenting the Award. What meant so much to Opje and Kitty was
that Jackie Kennedy came and made a great point of saying how important
the Award had been for Jack Kennedy, and how much he had looked forward
to giving Opje the prize in person.
As Opje became ill and was treated for the lung cancer that killed him,
his many, many friends would come for a farewell visit in Princerton. I was
among those who saw him in January just before his death. He had words for
each of us that related to his interaction with us through the years. It was not
so much that we were helping him as he was helping us cope with the fact that
he was dying.
His memorial service was a most moving event. Hans Bethe recalled
his contributions to science; Harry Smythe his contributions at Los Alamos;
and George Kennan talked about the larger role that Opje had played in the
intellectual life of the country and of the world. Those quite extraordinary
talks were then followed by a piece performed by the Julliard Quartet.
Let me turn briefly to Opje as a scientist. As graduate students at Berkeley,
we would speculate on how it could have been that this absolutely brilliant
man who was brighter than anyone we could imagine had never done work
that would have brought him a Nobel Prize. We were simply ignorant of
the fact he had in fact done so, in two seminal papers written in the late
1930s.
One was on the first serious calculation of the structure of a neutron star.
With his student George Volkoff, he calculated the equation of state, radius,
and likely maximum mass of a neutron star, a star made up almost entirely of
neutrons, in which the gravitational attraction is balanced by the zero point
energy the neutrons possess as a result of the Pauli exclusion principle. They
found a radius of the order of seven kilometers, some four plus miles, while
the average density of the neutrons was a little less than that of nuclear matter.
These are amazing objects, containing as they do the most dense form of
observable matter in the universe. They were only discovered some thirty
years later, when pulsars were identified as rotating neutron stars.
With his student Hartland Snyder, he wrote the first paper on stellar
gravitational collapse. Opje had realized that as the stellar mass increased, the
gravitational attraction could not continue to be in balance with the Fermi
pressure of the neutrons indefinitely. If you had too great a mass, the star
would simply collapse, leaving behind a gravitational singularity. So, in a very
real sense, he discovered both neutron stars and “black holes.” If Opje had not
been a chain smoker, if he had lived to a reasonable age, he would surely have
received a Nobel Prize for this work sometime in the 1970s.
Let me conclude by saying a little bit about Oppenheimer the man. I
have been lucky enough to know quite a few Nobel laureates and others whom
you would classify as “geniuses.” Opje stood out. He was probably the quickest
of the group — the fastest to grasp the import of something new, the fastest
to adapt to a changed circumstance. This brilliance was a total disaster for
him growing up because it set him apart from all of his youthful counterparts,
as many people have described. As a result, the barriers between him and his
peers and later his colleagues were always there, because he thought much
more quickly than almost anybody to whom he ever talked.
All great scientists are capable of holding more than one idea in their head
at a time. Opje was capable of holding not two but maybe three of four. This,
I suspect, is part of what led to his getting into problems during his wartime
conversations with security people in which, as we heard quite convincingly
today, he was trying to invent scenarios in order to protect his brother.
Opje leaned how to be a friend. It is clear that he probably had almost no
friends until he was in his teens, probably into his twenties, but he developed
a marvelous capacity for friendship. He became for many of us a caring and
loving individual with whom it was a total pleasure to be around.
What further set him apart among people of remarkable creativity and
intelligence was the capacity he developed for leadership. This was totally
unexpected by almost anyone who knew him as a young man. As the leader
of the only major school of American theoretical physics in the 1930s, he
clearly had intimations of what he could do as a leader in physics. But this
achievement was dwarfed by the extraordinary job he did during the three
years he led the Manhattan Project.
He was as outstanding a leader as he was a scientist, mentor, teacher, and
friend. All of us who knew him well still miss him and remember him with
great affection and admiration.
Thank you.
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER: CONSUMMATE

PHYSICIST
Maurice M. Shapiro
Professor, University of Maryland
In a memorial symposium celebrat-

ing the life and work of Robert
Oppenheimer, it is natural that his
role in hastening the end of World
War II should be highlighted. It is this
indispensable achievement that assures
his place in history. As a wartime
group leader under Oppenheimer in
Maurice Shapiro
Los Alamos, I am acutely aware of the
extraordinary qualities of leadership that enabled him to coordinate the efforts
of many “prima-donnas.” And yet there is another important facet of Oppie’s
career that should be remembered. He was a brilliant thinker and teacher who
would have left an indelible imprint on science — and notably on physics in
America — even if there had been no World War II. Since his major con-
tributions as a theorist were to the science of quantum mechanics as applied
to cosmic rays, I venture to emphasize these contributions in my talk. I am
mindful that my audience is composed largely of non-physicists, so I should
try to pride some background.
In 1939 Arthur Holly Compton convened an International Conference
on Cosmic Rays, which attracted virtually all the leading physicists in the
field. Among them were: Viktor Hess, the discoverer of cosmic rays; Carl
Anderson, discoverer of the positron, who shared the Nobel Prize with Hess;
Werner Heisenberg; Walther Bothe; Manuel Vallarta; Hans Bethe; Robert
148
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Consummate Physicist 149
Oppenheimer; Bruno Rossi; Pierre Auger; and Edward Teller. It was plain
that Oppie was highly esteemed by his peers.
A School of Theoretical Physics

As a graduate student of Compton’s, I was privileged to attend this conference
at the University of Chicago, and that is how I first met Oppenheimer. Then
35 years old, he was already recognized as the founder of the first school of
theoretical physics in the United States, which functioned on two campuses:
the University of California at Berkeley and the California Institute of Tech-
nology. Twice each year, as Oppenheimer moved from one campus to the
other, his graduate students followed him.
Nuclear Theory and Cosmic-Ray Showers

Ten years earlier, having mastered and contributed to the new science of quan-
tum mechanics in Göttigen, Oppenheimer returned to the U.S. and joined the
Berkeley faculty. Ernest Lawrence welcomed him as the “house theorist” who
could make sense out of the findings in nuclear physics that were pouring out of
experiments at the cyclotron. In Berkeley, Oppenheimer also taught quantum
mechanics, and attracted a following of students and other collaborators.
Being impressed with the experimental program at Caltech,
Oppenheimer accepted the concurrent offer of an appointment to teach quan-
tum mechanics there as well. While engaged in low-energy nuclear theory, he
realized that nature’s accelerator — the cosmic radiation — offered the oppor-
tunity not then available at existing accelerators to probe more deeply into
the nature of nuclear matter. The 1930’s atmospheric showers of cosmic rays,
revealed conspicuously in the work of Rossi and Auger, presented a challenge
to theorists: could the multiplication of photons and electron pairs be eluci-
dated by means of the existing theory of quantum electrodynamics? The effort
to understand the observations of showers attracted the attention of leading
physicists such as Bethe, Heitler, Bhabha and Nordheim. Oppenheimer and
his associates, notably Carlson and Serber, were also active in this quest.
Cosmic-Ray Primaries
Compton’s most important contribution to the field in the early thirties had
been the demonstration, through a world survey of cosmic-ray intensities, of
a variation with geomagnetic latitude. This showed that the “primary” cos-
mic rays incident upon the earth’s atmosphere must be charged particles. The
competing view, championed by Robert Millikan, asserted that the primaries
are gamma rays — an assumption that had previously seemed reasonable in
the light of the strong penetrating power of the “rays.” Meanwhile, Rossi sug-
gested that a comparison of intensities from the east and west would reveal
whether the primaries were mainly positively charged or negative, i.e., as gen-
erally supposed, positrons or electrons. East–West experiments showed that
the primaries were mainly (if not entirely) positive. Not until 1941, in a mem-
orable balloon investigation by Schein, Jesse and Wollan, was it demonstrated
that the primaries had to be mainly protons.
In a brilliant cosmic-ray review (published the same year, but evidently
written in 1940) Oppenheimer was unaware of the Schein experiment, and
so he supposed that the puzzle of the cosmic ray primaries was still unsolved.
It is worth noting that three decades had elapsed after Hess’ balloon flights
before the identity of the main component of the primaries was revealed. And
another six years elapsed before it became clear that heavier nuclei than those
of hydrogen also arrived among the primaries. In due course it was shown that
virtually the whole periodic table of the elements — and many isotopes of those
elements — comprised the rich array of the cosmic-ray primaries. Schein’s
important contribution remained almost unknown for some years because
it was published when most physicists were too busy with wartime research
to read The Physical Review. It is likely that Oppenheimer, fully engaged in
helping to plan and organize the Manhattan Project, was among those who
missed this discovery.
Showers: Radiation and Pair-Production

We return to the problem of electromagnetic cascades to which Oppenheimer
and his collaborators contributed significantly in the 1930s. These showers of
electrons and photons were called the “soft” component, as they were readily
absorbed in dense materials. They are propagated by a succession of radioactive
and pair-production events. When an energetic electron or positron collides
with an atom, a photon (X-ray or gamma-ray) is produced. When, in turn,
the energetic photon strikes an atom, it can produce an electron–positron
pair. The repetition and propagation of these radioactive and pair-producing
processes results in a multiplication of particles, generating a shower. When
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Consummate Physicist 151
the energy of the initiating particle exceeds some million billion electron-volts,
the resulting cascade is known as an EAS (extensive air shower), first discovered
by P. Auger.
Mesotrons (Mesons)
In addition to the soft component, a “hard” component was observed, which
could penetrate great thicknesses of iron or lead. These turned out to be “mu
mesons,” intermediate in mass between electrons and protons. P. Blackett and
G. Occhialini, among others, used cloud chambers in magnetic fields to study
the nature of shower particles. Their photographs revealed tracks of particles
that exhibited greater magnetic rigidity than those of electrons. These were
evidently due to the penetrating particles observed by Anderson and others.
They came to be called “mesotrons” (subsequently “muons”), and seemed to
possess some properties of the short-lived “nuclear-glue” particles postulated
by H. Yukawa. These muons had a mass in the range of 100–200 electrons
masses, and a lifetime of about 2 microseconds.
Could the Muons be Yukawa Particles?

The muons presented a tantalizing puzzle. Despite their similarity in mass
and lifetime to Yukawa’s particles, their great penetrating power contradicted
an essential attribute of mesotrons, i.e., their strong interaction with nuclear
matter. In due course, the puzzle was solved, first by theorists, and later by
experimental confirmation. R. Marshak and H. Bethe proposed a two-meson
hypothesis: a parent meson and its radioactive daughter. The first, assumed to
be produced in violent collisions near the top of the atmosphere, was a very
short-lived Yukawa-type particle. Its charged decay product was the penetrating
particle detected in cloud chambers.
Soon, in 1946, this hypothesis was verified by Powell, Occhialini, and
Lattes, who had exposed sensitive photographic emulsions at a mountain alti-
tude. They found microscopic tracks of what they called pi mesons (or pions)
decaying into mu mesons (muons). The muons decayed, in turn, giving rise to
electrons. The mystery was solved: the anticipated Yukawa particles were the
pions, with a lifetime of roughly one percent of a microsecond. In this time
interval they could hardly travel very far before their disintegration into the
longer-lived, penetrating muons. The latter could survive down to sea level
and even penetrate deep underground, thanks to time-dilation of relativistic

particles. Evidently the muons constituted the hard component observed at
sea level. Soon it was realized that neutrinos were also emitted among the decay
products of both pions and muons.
Neutral Pions and Showers

Although cosmic-ray showers were extensively studied, their origin in the upper
atmosphere was a mystery. According to B. Rossi, Oppenheimer proposed
in 1947 the existence of neutral pions that decayed promptly into pairs of
gamma rays, thereby initiating electromagnetic cascades. This hypothesis was
soon verified experimentally. The discovery of charged pions which gave rise
to the hard component (via their daughter muons) could hardly have been
anticipated in the 1930s, however, the elucidation of cascade development in
the atmosphere demonstrated the power of quantum mechanics to account
quantitatively for the successive (alternating) processes of radiation and pair
production that generated cosmic-ray showers. In this important application
of electromagnetic theory, Oppenheimer and his co-workers played a notable
part between 1930 and 1937. His interest in cosmic rays continued until 1941,
and was resumed after the interruption due to World War II.
Of some eighty of Oppenheimer’s published papers in physics, 29 were
devoted to cosmic-ray theory. In some of these he enjoyed the collaboration
of students and colleagues (see Appendix below). His other principal con-
tributions were in quantum mechanics, nuclear theory, and the theory of
neutron stars.
If this talk has emphasized cosmic-ray theory, this may be understood in
view of Oppenheimer’s great interest in and significant contributions to the
field. Also, I confess that, since my own career in physics has been devoted
mainly to working in this discipline, I felt comfortable in discussing it.
In conclusion, I thank Ms. Cindy Kelly for inviting me to participate in
this symposium in fond memory of a great scientist and a good friend.
Appendix: Oppenheimer’s Principal Collaborators in

Cosmic-Ray Theory
H.E. Bethe, J.F. Carlson, R.F. Christy, W.H. Furry, H.W. Lewis, L. Nedelsky,
E.C. Nelson, L.W. Nordheim, J. Schwinger, R. Serber, S.A. Wouthuysen.
A FEW WORDS FROM AN OPPENHEIMER
Andrew R. Oppenheimer
It is truly a great honor for me to be a part of

this very special celebration this weekend. I
am very grateful to Cindy Kelly for asking me
to speak at the dedication of the house where
Robert Oppenheimer and his family lived
here in Los Alamos during the Manhattan
Project, and at this Symposium. Thank you
for inviting me.
I am proud beyond measure to talk
about a man who has influenced the world
more than most people both in the U.S. and Andrew R. Oppenheimer
Photo by Rick Scibelli
beyond realize today, and about the effect
he has had on my life. Indeed, it is my fascination with the life of Robert
Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the Cold War that brought me
to my eventual career — as a nuclear weapons expert for Jane’s Information
Group and other institutes. In this role I am immersed daily in the technology
and issues surrounding weapons of mass destruction. I feel a heavy responsi-
bility in these troubled times we live in. In my own small way I am trying to
continue the Oppenheimer tradition: to advise and communicate on weapons
issues and problems.
Since childhood I knew that this great and famous man whose name I
am so proud to bear had changed the world forever. As a student of physics,
and of politics, in Liverpool where I grew up, I became fascinated by the drama
and tragedy of the Bomb. I devoured everything I could find about nuclear
weapons — both the science and the politics — and everything about Robert
Oppenheimer. His science, his Bomb, his terrible trial, his life.
153
“Father of the Atomic Bomb.” This nomenclature may be a cliché but

it is a title that echoes down the years, as it represents in a few words what
Oppenheimer’s role was in ushering in the world’s first, true, weapon of mass
destruction, in the midst of the world’s worst-ever war. Those great and good
scientists who made the atomic bomb under his leadership believed that the
Nazis were developing one — the very essence of the unthinkable. They
had every right to believe that. When this didn’t happen, events had over-
taken them.
I first came to Los Alamos in the late 1980s. I got to know the town
and the many lovely people who have made me welcome during seven visits.
I soaked up this place’s extraordinary history and tried to imagine how it was
when it all began. So, as the Centennial approached, I hoped so much that
I could come over to join you in celebrating one of the greatest Americans
of the 20th century — an icon of science and of leadership, of creation and
destruction, and above all, of great humanity. There is no doubt that he was
the most important nuclear scientist in history, who was not rewarded enough
in his life.
In the early 1980s I saw the monumental BBC seven-part drama about
Robert which won drama awards in Britain. I spoke at my first conferences
about nuclear weapons — particularly on missile defense, which was an emerg-
ing policy. At that time — at the height of the second Cold War — people
were increasingly taking an interest in the nuclear arms race and the history
of the Bomb. There now needs to be a revival about the subject on TV and
also in the movies — but any film about Robert will have to be of really great
quality if it is to equal that BBC series.
Things have changed since the Cold War crisis that we were going
through then, back in the 1980s. Today, in the post-9/11 world, the emphasis
is on proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the growing possibility
of terrorists using nuclear or radiological weapons. These are subjects I special-
ize in and about which I speak at conferences. I am interviewed by the media
about these problems and about events as they unfold. It is a job I do with
enormous pride and which is full of resonances for me.
The nuclear terrorism issue has a special resonance. As early as the late
1940s, Robert Oppenheimer was asked at a congressional hearing how author-
ities would detect a nuclear weapon in an incoming shipping crate. The answer
was: “with a screwdriver” — meaning you would have to open up every crate
A Few Words from an Oppenheimer 155
that came into American ports. The Atomic Energy Commission then com-
missioned a panel to study how to detect and prevent nuclear weapons from
being smuggled into the country. It became known as the Screwdriver Report
and remains classified to this day — never was it more relevant than now.
Our world continues to search for heroes. We must therefore rehabilitate
this hero of the 20th century in the eyes of America and the world — a world
that still lives with nuclear weapons. Robert Oppenheimer’s actions, however
flawed they were judged to be, expose the eternal dilemma of the scientist in
our modern age. This dilemma is just as great today, when we face a revolution
in biotechnology, enabling us with the potential to construct incurable diseases
that could wipe out millions. And to evolve other technologies with similar
portent, such as could enable a fourth generation of nuclear weapons and
exotic explosives with the equivalent power of a hydrogen bomb.
As I deal every day with these issues I feel Robert’s spirit guiding me.
If I come upon a problem, or have to speak on these issues, or encounter a
difficult challenge, I feel Robert’s spirit guiding me. I only hope to God that
I have attained just one atom of his brilliance and wisdom.
November 15, 2005 9:49 B318: Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project (Ed: Yun Cheng Mok) appendices

Appendices
157
158
APPENDIX I — AGENDA FOR

OPPENHEIMER AND THE
MANHATTAN PROJECT
“Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project” Los Alamos, NM

Friday, June 25 and Saturday, June 26, 2004
AGENDA 6/17/04
Friday, June 25, 2004

10:00 AM; 12:00 PM; 1:30 PM and 3:00 PM Tours of the Manhattan Project
at Los Alamos
Tours will begin at the Bradbury Science Museum and will bring to life
the Los Alamos of the Manhattan Project from the technical areas to
the top-secret community. Historians, Manhattan Project veterans and
family members will augment the professional guides for a lively and
informative narrative.
9:00 AM – 4:00 PM Special Programs at the Bradbury Science Museum

Visitors will enjoy an overview of the history of Los Alamos and a virtual
tour of the Manhattan Project properties that are now located “behind
the fence” with free slide show offered by the Los Alamos National
Laboratory at 11 AM, 1 PM and 3 PM.
An 18-minute documentary film, “The Town that Never Was,” will be
shown at 10 AM, 12 PM and 2 PM with reminiscences from Manhattan
Project veterans John Mench (@10:30), McAllister Hull (@12:30) and
Paris Howard (@2:30).
159
160 Appendices
1:00 PM – 4:30 PM Book Signing by Authors at Fuller Lodge

Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, will be
available for book signing with Jon Hunner and Robert Norris from
1:00 PM to 2:45 PM and with Gregg Herken, Joseph Kanon and Ferenc
Szasz from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM. The Los Alamos Historical Society will
have copies of the books available for sale.
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM Open House — J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Home

Helene and Gerry Suydam have graciously opened their home so that
the public can see where the Oppenheimer family lived during the
Manhattan Project.
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM Dedication of the Oppenheimer House at the Rose

Garden behind Fuller Lodge, Los Alamos
U.S. Senator Pete Domenici, Governor Bill Richardson, LANL Director
Pete Nanos, Chairman Nona Bowman, Los Alamos County Council,
Nancy Bartlit, Los Alamos Historical Society, Ernest Ortega, National
Park Service, Santa Fe, NM; Peter Wirth, NM State Representative, and
Andy Oppenheimer, cousin of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
6:00 PM – 9:00 PM Reception and Dinner at Fuller Lodge

Brief remarks by LANL Director Pete Nanos and others
Saturday, June 26, 2004: Symposium on Oppenheimer and the

Manhattan Project
8:00 AM – 9:00 AM Registration at the Smith Civic Auditorium,
Los Alamos
9:00 AM Welcoming Remarks — Cynthia Kelly, President,
Atomic Heritage Foundation; Chairman of
Los Alamos County Council Nona Bowman;
Director Pete Nanos
The Significance of the Manhattan Project: A National
Perspective
Senator Jeff Bingaman, U.S. Senator for
New Mexico
Appendix I — Agenda for Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project 161
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Deputy Administrator Everett Beckner, National
Nuclear Security Administration
The Manhattan Project and New Mexican History
Stuart Ashman, Director, Office of Cultural Affairs,
State of New Mexico
10:00 AM Oppenheimer: King of the Hill
Richard Rhodes — Keynote Address
10:45 AM Press Opportunity (Break)
11:15 AM Oppenheimer — Years Before the Manhattan Project
Jon Hunner, “The Early Years of Robert
Oppenheimer”
11:35 AM Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project
Robert Norris, “General Groves’ Indispensable
Scientist”
Kai Bird, “Oppenheimer: The Manhattan Project
Years”
12:15 PM Lunch Break
1:15 PM Alternative Perspectives
Gregg Herken, “The Cautionary Tale of Robert
Oppenheimer”
Joseph Kanon, “A Novel Idea of Oppenheimer”
2:10 PM Reflections on Oppenheimer
Ferenc Szasz, “Oppenheimer and New Mexico”
Maurice Shapiro, “J. Robert Oppenheimer —
Consummate Physicist”
3:00 PM Break
3:20 PM Oppenheimer Remembered: Personal Vignettes
Ed Gerjuoy, “Oppenheimer as a Teacher of Physics
and Ph.D. Advisor”
162 Appendices
Andy Oppenheimer, “A Few Words from the

Oppenheimer Family”
David Pines, “Remembering Opje: Teacher, Scientist,
and Friend”
4:20 PM Preserving the History of the Manhattan Project
Cynthia Kelly, “Defying the Odds”
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM Book Signing
APPENDIX II — CONTRIBUTORS
Stuart Ashman is the Cabinet Secretary for the Department of Cultural Affairs
for the State of New Mexico, where he is responsible for the oversight and
vision for a complex group of cultural institutions, including the New Mexico
Historic Preservation Division. He has served as the director for several muse-
ums, including the Governor’s Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts in the
Museum of New Mexico as well as most recently at the Museum of Spanish
Colonial Art.
Everet Beckner is Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs at the
Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA),
responsible for the nation’s nuclear weapons complex. He recently retired
as Vice President at Lockheed Martin and previously served as the Energy
Department’s Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense Programs
(1991–1995). He has also worked at the Sandia National Laboratories and
has a Ph.D. in physics.
Senator Jeff Bingaman graduated from Harvard University in 1965 and earned
a law degree from Stanford University in 1968. After a year as New Mexico
Assistant Attorney General and nine years in private law practice, he was elected
Attorney General of New Mexico in 1978 and to the U.S. Senate in 1982.
Kai Bird is a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
He is the biographer of John J. McCloy and McGeorge and William Bundy
and co-editor of Hiroshima’s Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the
Smithsonian Controversy. He is co-author with Martin Sherwin of American
Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Nona Bowman was elected chair of the County Council in January 2004. She
brings a record of community service to this position extending from
163
164 Appendices
Los Alamos back to Gaithersburg, Maryland and to Livermore, California. Her

first action upon arriving in Los Alamos was co-chairing the first renovation
of Fuller Lodge in 1986, which arrested the deterioration of the Lodge and
helped establish it as the centerpiece site for Los Alamos history.
Senator Pete Domenici graduated from the University of New Mexico in 1954
and earned a law degree from the University of Denver in 1958. Domenici
spent the time in between his two degrees teaching math at Garfield Junior
High and pitching for the Albuquerque Dukes, a farm team of the Brooklyn
Dodgers. He was elected to the Albuquerque City Commission in 1966 and
then the Senate in 1972. With re-election in 2002, Domenici became the first
New Mexican elected to serve six terms in the Senate.
Edward Gerjuoy is Professor of Physics Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh.

In 1977, after a full career in physics teaching and research, he obtained a J.D.
degree; thereafter, he has divided his time between physics and environmental
law. He is the author of more than 100 physics publications, 40 papers on legal
and public policy issues, and about 100 adjudicating opinions while serving
as a member of the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board.
Gregg Herken is an historian and professor in the School of Social Sciences,

Humanities and Arts at the University of California, Merced. Formerly, he
was the Curator of Military Space History at the Smithsonian Institution’s
National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. He is the author of
three books on nuclear history and a biography, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The
Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward
Teller (Henry Holt and Company).
Jon Hunner directs the Public History Program at New Mexico State University
where he also teaches U.S. history. His first book, Inventing Los Alamos: The
Growth of an Atomic Community, was released in the fall of 2004. His next
book, tentatively titled, Chasing Oppie: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American
West, is scheduled for release in 2007.
Joseph Kanon has written four novels, Los Alamos, The Prodigal Spy, The Good
German and Alibi. Los Alamos, a historical thriller about the Manhattan Project
in the spring of 1945, was an international bestseller, translated into fifteen
languages, and won the Edgar Award.
Appendix II — Contributors 165
Cynthia C. Kelly is President of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, dedicated

to the preservation of the history of the Manhattan Project and the Atomic
Age. For over twenty years, she was a senior manager at the Environmental
Protection Agency and Department of Energy and received a Distinguished
Career Service Award in 1999.
Pete Nanos is the Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. During his
distinguished naval career, he commanded the strategic nuclear program and
served as Commander, Naval Sea Systems Command for the Navy. Upon leav-
ing the Navy, he served as principal deputy associate director for Los Alamos
National Laboratory’s Threat Reduction Directorate before taking the Direc-
tor’s position with the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Robert S. Norris has been a research associate for almost twenty years at the
Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, DC, covering nuclear
weapons issues. As an author of the multi-volume Nuclear Weapons Data-
book series, and of numerous articles, he has written extensively about the
nuclear programs of the United States, Soviet Union/Russia, Britain, France,
and China. He is the author of Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves,
the Manhattan Project’s Indispensable Man (Steerforth Press, 2002).
Andrew R. Oppenheimer, cousin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, is a nuclear

weapons expert and consultant on weapons of mass destruction for govern-
ments and institutes in Britain, where he is based, and the United States.
He has degrees from the University of Liverpool, King’s College London and
the Open University. Andy Oppenheimer is also an artist whose portraits of
J. Robert Oppenheimer were shown in Los Alamos in 2003.
David Pines is a theoretical physicist who is the founding Co-Director of the

Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter and Research Professor of Physics and
Professor Emeritus of the Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. His current research is focused on emergent behavior in
unconventional superconductors. His contributions to the theory of many-
body systems and to theoretical astrophysics have been recognized by two
Guggenheim Fellowships, the Feenberg Medal, Friemann, Dirac, and Drucker
Prizes, and by his election to the National Academy of Sciences, American
Philosophical Society, the Russian and Hungarian Academies of Sciences, and
other scholarly societies.
166 Appendices
Richard Rhodes is the author of 20 books, including The Making of the Atomic
Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, and Dark Sun, one of three
finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in History, that continued the story of nuclear
weapons development in the early Cold War years. Rhodes has written exten-
sively about nuclear issues and lectured widely in the United States and abroad.
Maurice M. Shapiro is Visiting Professor, University of Maryland. After the
Manhattan Project, he had a distinguished career in the field of cosmic rays
and neutrino astrophysics. Dr. Shapiro is director of the International School
of Cosmic Ray Astrophysics that holds biennial courses for graduate students
and young researchers in Erice, Italy.
Ferenc Szasz is Regents’ Professor of History at the University of New Mexico
where he has taught American Social and Intellectual History for over three
decades. He has published several articles and two books on the early atomic
world: British Scientists and the Manhattan Project: The Los Alamos Years and
The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion,
July 16, 1945.
November 15, 2005 9:50 B318: Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project (Ed: Yun Cheng Mok) index
Index
167
168
Index 169
A Breit, Gregory, 106

Acheson, Dean, 18–22, 59 Bridgman, Percy, 98
Acheson–Lilienthal Report, 18, 21, 22, 59 British Mission, 55
Adler, Felix, 90 Brode, Bernice, 48, 67–71, 76
Alamogordo, New Mexico, 28 Bush, Vannevar, 16, 18, 22
Albuquerque, New Mexico, 41, 43, 44, 46, Byrnes, Jimmy, 18
49, 51–53, 55, 56, 60–64, 70, 76, 93,
95, 164 C
Alvarez, Luis, 16, 19, 106 California Institute of Technology
American Physical Society, 128 (Caltech), 26, 45, 59, 103, 149
Anderson, Carl, 148 Cambridge University, 29, 41, 43, 45, 46,
anti-semitism, 90 48, 54, 99–103, 108
Arneson, Gordon, 19 Cartier-Bresson, 144
Arsenic and Old Lace, 67 Cerro Grande fire, 38, 64
artificial intelligence, 83 Chaves, Don Amado, 94, 100
Association of Los Alamos Scientists Chevalier, Haakon, 143
(ALAS), 57 Cheyenne, Wyoming, 67
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 12, 13, Chicago, Illinois, 41, 49, 106, 108, 111,
37, 41, 53, 55, 59, 61–64, 87, 88, 108, 113, 115
109, 155 Church, Peggy Pond, 49, 63
atomic spectroscopy, 125 Clinton Engineer Works, 110
Auger, Pierre, 149, 151 Columbia University, 5, 49, 106
Compton, Arthur, 16, 82, 87, 106, 107,
B 148
B’nai B’rith, 17 Conant, James, 18, 19, 105, 107, 109–111,
Bainbridge, Ken, 16 113
Bandelier National Monument, 47 Connell, A.J., 47, 52
Bardeen, John, 82 Cornell University, 52
Barnard, Chester, 16, 18 Corsica, 102
Bathtub Row, 37 cosmic ray phenomenon, 125, 149, 152
Bethe, Hans, 15, 16, 42, 81, 82, 106, 127, Cowles, New Mexico, 43, 94, 100, 101
136, 145, 148, 149, 151, 152 crash implosion, 112
Bhagavad-Gita, 28, 57 cyclotron, 130, 149
Birge, Raymond T., 122, 127, 128, 137
Bishop’s Lodge, Santa Fe, 100 D
black holes, 128, 146 de Oñate, Don Juan, 38
Bloch, Felix, 106, 130, 131 de Silva, Captain Peer, 72
Bock’s Car, 56 dementia praecox (schizophrenia), 102
Bohm, David, 139, 142 Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad,
Bohr, Niels, 19–21, 23, 48, 62, 80, 81, 142 47
Borden, William, 17, 18 Department of Energy (DOE), 4–6, 79,
Born, Max, 29, 103, 126, 136 163, 165
Bothe, Walther, 148 Didisheim, Jane, 93
Boyd, William, 98 Dietrich, Marlene, 144
Bradbury, Naval Commander Norris, 57, Dirac, Paul, 82
60, 62 Dupont Company, 113
170 Index
E Hawkins, David, 54, 109

École Normale, 144 Heisenberg, Werner, 81, 148
Edsall, John, 101 Hempelmann, Louis, 68–72, 75
Einstein, Albert, 15, 28, 57, 59, 60, 81, 142 Hernandez, Lou, 45
electromagnetic theory, 120, 121 Herz Mountains, Germany, 42
Empire State Building, 49 Hess, Viktor, 148
Enola Gay, 56 Hiroshima, 5, 15, 25, 48, 50, 56, 57, 87,
Ethical Cultural Movement, 90 91, 107, 114, 163
Ethical Culture School, 42, 43, 90, 92–94, historic preservation, 5, 38, 39, 163
101 Hitler, Adolf, 36, 126
Horgan, Paul, 46, 51, 95, 96, 100
F House at Otowi Bridge, The, 49
Farraday, Michael, 81 Huning, Clara, 43
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 13, Huning, Fritz, 43
14, 55, 88
Fergusson, Erna, 95 I
Fergusson, Francis, 42–44, 46, 93, 97, 101 Institute for Advanced Study, 58
Fergusson, Harvey, 43, 95 International Atomic Energy Committee,
Fermi, Enrico, 5, 14, 16, 35, 81, 87, 113, 60
127, 130 International Conference on Cosmic Rays,
Fermi prize, 145 148
field theory, 120, 139, 140
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 30 J
Foley, Jo Ann, 55 Jane’s Information Group, 153
Franck, James, 45 Jemez Springs, 51
Frijoles Canyon, 47, 54, 96 Jemez, New Mexico, 24, 51
Fuchs, Klaus, 16 Johnson, President Lyndon B., 14,
Fuller Lodge, 25, 26, 37, 160, 164 145
Julliard Quartet, 145
G
General Electric, 18 K
genetics and cellular biology, 83 K-25, 5, 113
Genghis Khan, 83–85 Kennan, George, 145
Greene, Priscilla, 67, 72 Kennedy, Jack, 145
Greenewalt, Crawford, 16 Kennedy, Jackie, 145
Groves, General Leslie R., 3, 15, 16, 18, 19, Kennedy, President John F., 14
29, 50–52, 56, 59–61, 63, 67, 73, 76, Kesselring, Joseph, 67
86, 87, 105, 106, 108–116, 161, 165 Kistiakowsky, George, 16
Klock, Augustus, 92
H Knights of Columbus, 17
Hanford Engineer Works, 110 Knoxville, Tennessee, 19
Hanford, Washington, 5, 15, 65, 110, 113, Kokshoreva, Madame, 130
114 Koshare Tour Services, 43
Harvard University, 28, 29, 41–43, 45, 52, Kruger, W.C., 37
93, 94, 97–99, 101, 103, 107, 163 Kublai Khan, 84
Index 171
L N
La Fonda Hotel, 44, 53 Nagasaki, 15, 54, 56, 87, 91, 114
Lansdale, John, 73, 87 Nageezi, 24
laser, 82, 83 National Academy of Sciences, 15, 165
Lawrence, Ernest O., 16, 42, 46, 81, 87, National Nuclear Security Administration
105, 106, 130, 143, 149, 164 (NNSA), 163
leadership, 146 National Park System, 14
LeMay, Curtis, 18 National Register of Historic Places, 36, 38
Life Magazine, 60 National Trust for Historic Preservation, 38
Lilienthal, David, 18–22 neutron star, 125, 145, 146, 152
Little Boy, 113–115 New Mexico Magazine, 44
Liverpool, England, 103, 153, 165 New Mexico State Environment
Long Island, New York, 97 Department, 64
Lorelei, 96 New York City, 42, 89, 97, 100, 110, 126
Los Alamos Boys’ Ranch School, 36, 37, 47, New York Mineralogy Society, 91
51, 52, 63, 70 Newark College of Engineering, 52
Los Alamos County Council, 7, 160 Newton, Alberta, 92
Los Alamos Historical Society, 7, 26, 40, Newton, Sir Isaac, 79, 81
41, 48, 53, 66, 76, 160 Nichols, Kenneth, 110
Los Alamos Inn, 64 Nobel Prize, 106, 128, 130, 132, 133, 148
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL),
4, 7, 11, 15, 37, 38, 40, 52, 60, 63, 159, O
160, 165 Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 5, 15, 19, 65,
Los Alamos Post Office, 37 110–113
Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL), Opje as a scientist, 145
41, 48, 50, 52, 54, 59–63 Opje’s course on quantum mechanics, 142
Los Piños, 94, 98 Oppenheimer
Lustron houses, 38 in the Pecos Wilderness, 43
Oppenheimer, Ella, 89, 90
M Oppenheimer, Frank, 28, 56, 91
Manhattan District, 20 Oppenheimer, J. Robert
Manley, John, 18, 57 administrative ability, 4, 16, 19, 29,
Mann, Thomas, 66 52, 55, 56, 109
Marshall, George, 114 AEC hearings, 61
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Edith Warner, 47, 49, 63
(MIT), 41, 46, 49, 80, 108 and Francis Fergusson, 93, 101
Materials Science Laboratory, 39 and General Leslie R. Groves, 51, 73,
MAUD Report, 15 87, 105, 108
Maxwell, James Clerk, 81 and Herbert Smith, 94, 96, 97
McKibbin, Dorothy, 60, 67, 69, 70 and New Mexico, 42, 46, 52, 61, 63,
memorial service, 145 95, 100, 104
mesotron (muon), 151, 152 and New York City, 89
Michnovicz, Mike, 69 and Ph.D. students, 125, 127, 134,
microelectronics, 82, 83 149
Millikan, Robert, 150 as director of LASL, 52, 54, 148
mu meson, 136, 151 at Cambridge University, 45, 101
172 Index
at Harvard University, 45, 97–99 Pauli’s article on quantum mechanics in the

at Los Alamos, 30, 67 Handbuch der Physik, 142
at the University of Göttingen, 103 Pecos Forest Reserve, 42–44, 63
charges against, 12, 41, 87 Perro Caliente, 70
classroom teaching style, 120, 123, Phillips, Melba, 128, 129, 137
130, 132 Physical Review, The, 150
Communist Party affiliation, 4, 17, 45 Physics Today, 58, 60, 109
depression, 97, 101 Pinker, Steven, 83
emotional involvement with the plutonium, 7, 54, 64, 107, 112–114
Manhattan Project, 57 Pond, Ashley, 36
Enrico Fermi Award, 14, 88 Princeton University, 41, 42, 46, 60, 86, 88
horseback riding, 54, 70 Pueblo Indians, 37, 44, 64, 71
illness, 42, 74, 94, 95 pulsars, 146
in Arsenic and Old Lace, 67
in the Pecos Wilderness, 44, 46, 51 Q
interests as a boy, 91, 92 quantum electrodynamics, 133, 149
interpersonal skills, 67–69, 75, 93, quantum mechanics, 103, 120–122, 124,
109, 122, 132 126, 137, 139, 148, 149, 152
linguistic ability, 93
opposition to the H-bomb, 12, 86, 88 R
panel on disarmament, 22 Rabi, I. I., 16–19, 68
post-war political and scientific issues, Reagan, President Ronald, 88
60, 155 Rio Grande River, 36, 46–48, 54, 64
quotations, 28, 55–59, 62, 67, 80 Rio La Casa River, 45
relationship with Frank, 92 Roosevelt, President Franklin D., 5, 15, 27,
sailing, 46, 60, 96 57
schizophrenia, 102 Roosevelt, President Theodore, 28
scientific achievement, 18, 61, 91, Rosen, Louis, 57
115, 148, 154 Rossi, Bruno, 149, 150, 152
technical and scientific dilemmas, 54, Rotblat, Joseph, 72
80, 107, 113 Rutherford, Ernest, 81, 99
Oppenheimer, Julius, 89, 90
Oppenheimer, Katherine, 76 S
Oppenheimer, Kitty, 31, 48, 54, 60, 62, 68, San Ildefonso Pueblo, 47–49, 71
70–72, 74–76 Sangre de Cristo Mountains, 70, 94, 100
Oppenheimer, Peter, 76 Sanskrit, 17, 126
Otowi Bridge, 46, 49, 63 Santa Fe, New Mexico, 37, 40, 45, 47, 48,
Our Southwest, 43 52, 53, 58, 67, 74, 100, 111, 160
Sardinia, 102
P Schawlow, Arthur, 82
Page, Katherine Chaves, 43, 44, 46, 94 Schiff, Leonard, 124, 132–134, 142
Pajarito Plateau, 36–38, 63 Schrödinger, Erwin, 81, 121, 126
Palo Alto, California, 130 Schwinger, Julian, 133–136, 152
Parsons, William S. “Deke”, 16, 68, 113 Seaborg, Glenn, 55
Pash, Boris, 17 Segre, Emilio, 16
Index 173
Senate Committee on Energy and Natural U

Resources, 14 U.S. Energy Research and Development
Serber, Robert, 23, 76, 106, 149 Administration (ERDA), 64
Sevareid, Eric, 59 United Nations (UN), 21, 22, 59, 60
Sherman, General William T., 110 University of California, Berkeley, 3, 45, 60,
Sherr, Pat, 72, 74, 76 61, 68, 103, 106, 107, 112, 113, 120,
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, 38 122–131, 137, 149
Smith, Alice Kimball, 43, 44, 46, 48, 49, University of Chicago, 5, 49, 87, 149
53, 91 University of Göttingen, Germany, 103
Smith, Cyril, 48, 49, 52 University of Leiden, Netherlands, 93
Smith, Herbert, 43, 44, 92, 94, 96, 100 University of Minnesota, 49
Smyth, Henry DeWolf, 86 University of New Mexico, 42, 49, 51, 52,
Smythe, Harry, 145 55, 56, 60, 70, 164, 166
Snyder, Hartland, 128, 138 University of Oregon, Eugene, 61
Socorro, New Mexico, 55 University of Pennsylvania, 58
Solvay Congress, 142 University of Rochester, 49
Stanford University, 28, 52, 130–133, 163 University of Washington, 61, 62
stellar gravitational collapse, 146 uranium, 5, 7, 21, 54, 107, 112–114
Stimson, Henry, 87 Urey, Harold, 16, 106
Strandlund, Carl, 38
Strategic Defense Initiative, 88 V
Strauss, Lewis, 13, 14, 17, 31 Vallarta, Manuel, 148
Sudaplatov, Pavel, 41 Virgin Islands, 60
Sundt units, 24 Volkoff, George, 145
Szilard, Leo, 16, 87 von Braun, Wernher, 80
von Neumann, John, 82
T
Taos, New Mexico, 49
Tech Area, Los Alamos, 71
W
Warner, Edith, 46, 48, 49, 63
Teller, Edward, 16, 42, 46, 53, 54, 82, 87,
Weinberg, Steven, 82
88, 105, 106, 149, 164
Weisskopf, Victor, 109
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 18, 19
Wernette, J.P., 61
terrorism, 84, 85, 154
Wigner, Eugene, 16, 82
thermal diffusion, 113
Wilson, Anne T., 68, 70, 73–75
Thomson, J.J., 100
Wilson, Robert R., 4, 66
Tibbets, Paul, 16
Workingman’s School, 90
Tilano, 47–49
Wyman, Jeffries, 98, 102
Tolman, Richard, 107
Townes, Charles, 82
transistor, 82 X
Trimethy, 46, 96 X-10 reactor, 112
Trinity Site, 35, 55, 56, 58, 64, 65, 166
Truman, President Harry S., 18, 58, 87 Y
Tuck, James, 55, 66 Y-12, 113

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

OPPENHEIMER AND THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

Typeset by Stallion Press

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCING OPPENHEIMER . . . . . . . . 9

CHAPTER 2: LIFE AT LOS ALAMOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

ROBERT OPPENHEIMER: A WINDOW ON HIS LIFE AT LOS ALAMOS . . 66

CHAPTER 3: OPPENHEIMER’S PLACE IN HISTORY . . . . . 77

CHAPTER 4: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ON OPPENHEIMER 117

A FEW WORDS FROM AN OPPENHEIMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

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DEFYING THE ODDS

Investing two billion dollars in an attempt to build

When General Leslie Groves decided to choose J. Robert Oppenheimer

reservations, coupled with Oppenheimer’s alleged Communist Party afﬁlia-

Defying the Odds 5

3 This report, “Preserving the Remains of the Manhattan Project,” is available at

Defying the Odds 7

By witnessing ﬁrst-hand the humble wooden sheds at Los Alamos where

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The Honorable Jeff Bingaman

The story of Robert Oppenheimer is as timely

by an aggressive former criminal prosecutor specially retained for the case.

Dr. Oppenheimer’s nemesis, Lewis Strauss, to be the Secretary of Commerce,

The Manhattan Project is fading into myth. Sad

Robert Oppenheimer: King of the Hill 17

Rabi knew him well:

I am certainly not competent to judge if Oppenheimer’s science was less

7 Quoted in ibid., pp. 240–241.

Robert Oppenheimer: King of the Hill 19

Oppenheimer came prepared. He had explored the complexities of inter-

Herb Marks, Acheson’s personal representative to the panel, who accom-

Robert Oppenheimer: King of the Hill 21

9 Quoted in ibid., p. 588.

Robert Oppenheimer: King of the Hill 23

A NOVEL IDEA OF OPPENHEIMER

It’s an honor for me to be with you today, and some-

A Novel Idea of Oppenheimer 25

When the organizers of this symposium asked me to speak, I said, “You

skewed, not quite right. It didn’t ﬁt

A Novel Idea of Oppenheimer 27

A Novel Idea of Oppenheimer 29

A Novel Idea of Oppenheimer 31

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Life at Los Alamos

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PRESERVATION ON THE PAJARITO

I’d like to highlight the historic signiﬁcance of

36 Life at Los Alamos

Preservation on the Pajarito Plateau 37

38 Life at Los Alamos

Los Alamos is home to sev-

Preservation on the Pajarito Plateau 39

this period of signiﬁcance and to document its original design, so it can be

J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER AND THE STATE

The sagas of famed atomic physicist J. Robert

J. Robert Oppenheimer and the State of New Mexico: A Reciprocal Relationship 41

42 Life at Los Alamos

International ﬁgure though

J. Robert Oppenheimer and the State of New Mexico: A Reciprocal Relationship 43

44 Life at Los Alamos

14 “Erna Fergusson,” Albuquerque Review, 8 February 1962; Albuquerque Journal, 12 February