J. Robert Oppenheimer

• 1. Introduction

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  J. Robert Oppenheimer stood in a control bunker near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the early morning hours of the 16th of July, 1945, holding a post to steady himself. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell watched him grow tenser as the final seconds ticked away. Then a burst of light split the desert sky and a deep growling roar rolled across the scrub. Farrell recalled that Oppenheimer's face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief. His brother Frank, also present, remembered his first words as simply, "I guess it worked."

  The world's first nuclear weapon had just detonated. The man responsible for building it was born Julius Robert Oppenheimer in New York City on the 22nd of April, 1904, the son of a textile importer and a painter, raised in an apartment on Riverside Drive whose walls held paintings by Pablo Picasso, Edouard Vuillard, and Vincent van Gogh. He would earn a doctorate at twenty-three, predict the existence of black holes a decade before anyone took the idea seriously, and then spend the rest of his life wrestling with what he had made.

  How did a boy who once nearly poisoned his tutor at Cambridge rise to direct the most secret scientific enterprise in American history? Why did the government he served strip him of his security clearance less than a decade after crowning him a national hero? And what did it cost him personally to become the person who, watching that desert fireball, thought of the Hindu god Vishnu and the line, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Mind Forming

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  At the Ethical Culture Society School in New York, founded by Felix Adler on the motto "Deed before Creed," Oppenheimer compressed third and fourth grades into a single year and skipped half of eighth grade. He took private music lessons from the French flutist Georges Barrere and developed a fascination with mineralogy so keen that the New York Mineralogical Club invited him to deliver a lecture when he was still a child.

  An attack of colitis contracted while prospecting in Jachymov, Czechoslovakia, delayed his entry to Harvard by a year. He spent part of that recovery in New Mexico, where he developed a love for horseback riding and the southwestern landscape that never left him. He entered Harvard College in 1922 at age eighteen and, to make up lost time, took six courses each term instead of the usual four. He graduated summa cum laude after only three years.

  At Cambridge, the fit was wrong from the start. He was accepted at Christ's College, but Ernest Rutherford was unimpressed by Bridgman's recommendation, which noted that Oppenheimer's clumsiness in the lab suggested theoretical work was his proper domain. J. J. Thomson took him anyway on condition he complete a basic laboratory course. Oppenheimer wrote to a friend that the lab work was "a terrible bore" and that he was "so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything." He developed an antagonistic relationship with his tutor, Patrick Blackett, a future Nobel laureate. According to his friend Francis Fergusson, Oppenheimer once confessed to leaving a poisoned apple on Blackett's desk; his parents intervened with university authorities. The episode is unverified and the book American Prometheus conceded it was unproven, but Oppenheimer did have regular sessions with a psychiatrist in Harley Street during this period.

  His inner turbulence could turn outward violently. When Fergusson tried to distract him from a period of apparent depression by describing a marriage proposal he had made to Frances Keeley, Oppenheimer jumped on him and tried to strangle him. He told his brother plainly, "I need physics more than friends." The move to Gottingen in 1926 changed the climate entirely. Max Born supervised him, and among the colleagues he made there were Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller. He was so dominating in seminars that Maria Goeppert presented Born with a petition threatening a boycott of the class unless he made Oppenheimer quiet down. Born left the petition on his desk where Oppenheimer could read it, and it worked without a word being said. Oppenheimer received his doctorate in March 1927 at age twenty-three. After his oral exam, the professor administering it, James Franck, reportedly said, "I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of questioning me."

• 3. The Berkeley Years

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  Linus Pauling and Oppenheimer planned a joint assault on the nature of the chemical bond after Oppenheimer arrived at the California Institute of Technology in 1927 on a National Research Council fellowship: Oppenheimer would supply the mathematics, Pauling would interpret the results. The collaboration ended abruptly after Oppenheimer invited Pauling's wife, Ava Helen Pauling, to join him on a trip to Mexico. Years later, when Oppenheimer offered Pauling the head of the Chemistry Division of the Manhattan Project, Pauling declined, saying he was a pacifist.

  At Leiden in the autumn of 1928, Oppenheimer gave lectures in Dutch despite having little prior experience with the language. His students there gave him the nickname Opje, later anglicized by his Berkeley students as "Oppie." Raymond Thayer Birge at Berkeley wanted him badly enough to agree to share him with Caltech for one term a year. Before taking up the professorship, Oppenheimer was diagnosed with a mild case of tuberculosis and spent weeks with his brother Frank at a New Mexico ranch. When he heard the ranch was available, he exclaimed, "Hot dog!" He later called it Perro Caliente, which means exactly that in Spanish, and said that "physics and desert country" were his "two great loves."

  Berkeley promoted him to full professor in 1936 at an annual salary of $3,300. Hans Bethe, who saw him in his element there, said that the most important thing Oppenheimer brought to his teaching was "his exquisite taste." Bethe described a group of around eight to ten graduate students and about six postdoctoral fellows who might spend a single afternoon discussing quantum electrodynamics, cosmic rays, electron pair production, and nuclear physics in sequence. His students were so taken with him that they adopted his walk, his speech patterns, his personal mannerisms, and even his habit of reading texts in their original languages.

  Not everyone was charmed. Associates fell into two camps: one saw him as an aloof and impressive genius; the other as a pretentious and insecure poseur. Oppenheimer repeatedly attempted to secure a position at Berkeley for Robert Serber but was blocked by Birge, who said that "one Jew in the department was enough." Oppenheimer's most significant scientific papers from this period included a 1939 collaboration with his student Hartland Snyder, "On Continued Gravitational Contraction," which predicted what would eventually be called black holes. After the war, physicists Luis Alvarez and Jeremy Bernstein suggested that if Oppenheimer had lived long enough to see these predictions confirmed by experiment, he might have won the Nobel Prize. When the historian Abraham Pais asked Oppenheimer what he considered his most important contributions, Oppenheimer cited his work on electrons and positrons, not gravitational contraction.

• 4. The Inner Life

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  Sanskrit came to Oppenheimer from Arthur W. Ryder at Berkeley in 1933. He had already begun reading classical Hindu texts in English translation after Harvard, drawn to them because they were difficult, and difficulty was what he sought. He eventually read the Bhagavad Gita and the Meghaduta in the original and cited the Gita as one of the books that most shaped his philosophy of life. He called it "the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue," gave copies to friends as gifts, and kept a worn personal copy on the bookshelf by his desk at Los Alamos. He quoted a passage from it at a memorial service for President Franklin Roosevelt held at Los Alamos. He nicknamed his car Garuda, the mount bird of the Hindu god Vishnu.

  His close colleague Isidor Isaac Rabi observed this quality from a long vantage, having known Oppenheimer across his Berkeley, Los Alamos, and Princeton years. Rabi wrote that Oppenheimer's immersion in Hindu thought "resulted in a feeling for the mystery of the universe that surrounded him almost like a fog" and that "at the border he tended to feel there was much more of the mysterious and novel than there actually was." Yet Rabi also concluded that it was this very spiritual quality, expressed in Oppenheimer's speech and manner, that formed the basis of his charisma: "He never expressed himself completely. He always left a feeling that there were depths of sensibility and insight not yet revealed."

  Politics entered his life with similar intensity in the 1930s. He claimed he did not read newspapers in his twenties and learned of the Wall Street crash of 1929 only while on a walk with Ernest Lawrence, six months after it happened. From 1934 onward, he earmarked three percent of his annual salary, about one hundred dollars, for two years, to support physicists fleeing Nazi Germany. He attended a longshoremen's rally during the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike with students including Melba Phillips and Robert Serber. After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, he hosted fundraisers for the Republican cause. Biographer Ray Monk wrote that in terms of time, effort, and money spent on party activities, Oppenheimer "was a very committed supporter" of the Communist Party, though Oppenheimer himself denied formal membership and described himself at the 1954 hearings as a "fellow traveler": someone who agrees with many of communism's goals but is not willing to blindly follow orders from any party apparatus. When his father died in 1937, leaving $392,602 to be divided between Oppenheimer and his brother Frank, Oppenheimer promptly wrote a will bequeathing his estate to the University of California to fund graduate scholarships.

• 5. Building the Bomb

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  Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves appointed Oppenheimer to head the Los Alamos Laboratory in late 1942, a decision that surprised many observers because Oppenheimer had neither a Nobel Prize nor any record of running a large organization. Groves was not troubled by the Nobel gap; he was impressed instead by what he called Oppenheimer's "overweening ambition" and his singular grasp of the practical aspects of an enterprise that would span physics, chemistry, metallurgy, ordnance, and engineering simultaneously. Rabi described the appointment as "a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves, who was not generally considered to be a genius."

  Oppenheimer suggested the laboratory site himself: a flat mesa near Santa Fe, New Mexico, that he knew well because it was close to his ranch. The site was home to the Los Alamos Ranch School, a private boys' school. Engineers worried about the poor access road and the water supply but otherwise considered it ideal. Oppenheimer actually went so far as to order a lieutenant colonel's uniform and take the Army physical, which he failed. Doctors found him underweight at 128 pounds, diagnosed his chronic cough as tuberculosis, and flagged his chronic lumbosacral joint pain. The plan to commission the scientists as soldiers collapsed when Rabi and Robert Bacher refused.

  Los Alamos grew from a few hundred people in 1943 to over 6,000 by 1945. Because scientists were paid their existing salaries, Oppenheimer, coming from a state university, initially earned less than some of his subordinates. Groves quietly raised his salary to match the others without informing him. Victor Weisskopf described Oppenheimer's leadership as physically present at every 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."

  The design path was not straight. In 1943, development centered on a plutonium gun-type weapon called Thin Man. When Los Alamos received its first plutonium sample from the X-10 Graphite Reactor in April 1944, a problem emerged: reactor-bred plutonium contained five times more plutonium-240 than the cyclotron-generated variety, making it unsuitable for a gun-type weapon. In July 1944, Oppenheimer abandoned Thin Man for an implosion design; a simpler gun-type version using highly enriched uranium became Little Boy in February 1945. The more complex implosion device, the "Christy gadget" named after his student Robert Christy, was finalized as Fat Man in a meeting in Oppenheimer's office on the 28th of February, 1945.

  On Groves's order of the 20th of July, 1943, Oppenheimer's security clearance was granted without delay because, as the directive stated, he was "absolutely essential to the project." His past associations were noted but overridden. Throughout the project, the FBI and the Manhattan Project's own security arm kept him under surveillance, following him during a visit to Jean Tatlock in California in June 1943. Tatlock killed herself on the 4th of January, 1944, leaving Oppenheimer deeply grieved.

• 6. Trinity and Its Aftermath

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  According to a 1949 magazine profile, the lines Oppenheimer recalled at the moment of the Trinity detonation came from the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one... Now I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds." In 1965 he described the scene this way: "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent."

  Rabi, watching him cross the base afterward, said: "I'll never forget his walk... like High Noon... this kind of strut. He had done it."

  At an assembly at Los Alamos on the evening of the 6th of August, 1945, the night Hiroshima was bombed, Oppenheimer took the stage and clasped his hands together like a prize-winning boxer while the crowd cheered. He expressed regret only that the weapon had not been ready in time for use against Nazi Germany. Eleven days later, on August 17, he traveled to Washington to hand-deliver a letter to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson expressing his revulsion and his desire to see nuclear weapons banned. In October, he told President Harry S. Truman, "Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands." Truman responded that he alone bore responsibility for the decision and later said he did not want to see Oppenheimer in his office again. For his work directing Los Alamos, Truman awarded Oppenheimer the Medal for Merit in 1946.

  He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics four times, in 1946, 1951, 1955, and 1967, but never won. His student Willis Lamb won the 1955 Nobel for the Lamb shift, a discovery Oppenheimer had anticipated in a 1931 paper co-written with Harvey Hall. Carl David Anderson won the 1936 Nobel for the positron, which Oppenheimer had essentially predicted in a 1930 paper based on Dirac's equation. The prizes went to others; the regret registered only in retrospect.

• 7. Influence and Ruin

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  Oppenheimer arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1947 with a salary of $20,000 per year, rent-free accommodation in a 17th-century manor set among 265 acres of woodland, a cook, and a groundskeeper. He collected French Post-Impressionist and Fauvist artworks, adding Cezanne, Rembrandt, and Renoir to a collection that already included Van Gogh and Picasso. He brought poets and diplomats to reside alongside physicists, inviting scholars like T. S. Eliot and George F. Kennan for temporary fellowships. Some of the mathematics faculty resented the humanities presence; Oppenheimer later told Abraham Pais that one of his personal failures at the institute was being unable to fully bridge the natural sciences and the humanities.

  As chairman of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1947, he lobbied for international arms control and pushed against the development of a hydrogen bomb. When the GAC recommended in October 1949 against pursuing the "Super," as the hydrogen bomb was known, the committee's language was unambiguous: a thermonuclear weapon could only be strategically used against civilian populations, and "its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations." Truman overruled the recommendation on the 31st of January, 1950.

  By 1953, Oppenheimer's accumulated influence across multiple government panels had made him an enemy of the advocates of strategic bombardment. On the 7th of November, 1953, William Liscum Borden, formerly the executive director of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, wrote to J. Edgar Hoover stating that "more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union." Eisenhower ordered a "blank wall" placed between Oppenheimer and government secrets on December 3. Lewis Strauss, an AEC commissioner who had harbored long-standing resentment toward Oppenheimer partly for the way Oppenheimer had once discussed the export of radioactive isotopes before Congress, calling them "less important than electronic devices but more important than, let us say, vitamins," now moved against him with the FBI's files in hand.

  The secret hearing, held in April and May of 1954, focused on Oppenheimer's communist associations and his opposition to the hydrogen bomb. Edward Teller testified that he considered Oppenheimer loyal but that Oppenheimer's actions had been "exceedingly hard to understand" and that he would "feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands." Teller's testimony outraged the scientific community and left him virtually ostracized from academic science. Ernest Lawrence refused to appear, pleading ulcerative colitis, but a recorded interview in which he condemned Oppenheimer was admitted as evidence. Rabi said the security suspension was unnecessary: "he is a consultant, and if you don't want to consult the guy, you don't consult him, period."

  The board revoked Oppenheimer's clearance by a 2-1 vote, unanimously clearing him of disloyalty but finding that 20 of the 24 charges were true or substantially true. The AEC upheld the findings on the 29th of June, 1954, by a 4-1 decision, with Strauss writing the majority opinion stressing Oppenheimer's "defects of character." Wernher von Braun told a Congressional committee: "In England, Oppenheimer would have been knighted."

• 8. Late Years and Vindication

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  In 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration awarded Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award for his contributions to theoretical physics, a formal gesture of rehabilitation that fell short of restoring his clearance. He served as director of the Institute for Advanced Study until 1966, stepping down because of failing health; he is the longest-serving director the institute has had.

  Oppenheimer died on the 18th of February, 1967. The security clearance revocation that had defined his final decade was vacated in 2022, when the U.S. Department of Energy formally rescinded the 1954 decision, a recognition that the hearing had been fundamentally flawed. The full transcript of the 1954 hearings had already been made public in 2014 by the Department of Energy, decades after a redacted version was published in June 1954.

  His brother Frank, fired from his University of Minnesota position after testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee that he had been a Communist Party member, spent years as a cattle rancher in Colorado before teaching high school physics and eventually founding the San Francisco Exploratorium. The family's trajectory after the bomb years was not simple. Peter, born in May 1941, and Katherine, born at Los Alamos on the 7th of December, 1944, grew up as the children of a man who had become simultaneously a national symbol and a national casualty. The papers Oppenheimer exchanged with Ruth Tolman, with whom he maintained a close friendship into her final years in 1957, are among the few private documents that survive to suggest the person behind the public figure: letters in which he addressed her as "My Love."