1) Here is the obituary notice that appeared in the New York Times when Oppenheimer died. It offers a good overview of his remarkable talents and his career.

 

2) This biographical statement appears to be by Hans Bethe; it includes some technical discussion of Oppenheimer’s discoveries in physics.

Here are the sections entitled: “Los Alamos,” “His Public Life,” and “The Security Investigation.”

During his Berkeley time, Oppie had also many friends in the faculty, scientists, classicists and artists. He studied and read Sanskrit with a colleague, and his private reading ranged over the classics, novels, plays and poetry.

Most of the time he was indifferent to the events around him; he never read a newspaper, he had no radio or telephone, he learned of the stock market crash in 1929 only long after the event.

His interest in politics began in 1936. He had been much disturbed by the treatment of the Jews of Germany, including some of his relatives. He saw the effect of the American depression on his students, and had great compassion with them and others who could not find any jobs.

In these days, Oppie's sympathies were quite left-wing. He contributed to a strike fund of the Longshoremen's Union and to various committees helping the Spanish Loyalists in the Civil War. His brother and his sister-in-law were members of the Communist Party for some time; he himself apparently never joined. As far as I can tell, he moved away from the party in 1939 and 1940. He was disgusted by the pact between Stalin and Hitler which permitted Hitler to start the Second World War. He was deeply distressed by the fall of France in 1940. I saw him shortly thereafter at an evening party when he spoke long and eloquently about the terrible tragedy that the fall of France meant to Western civilization. Clearly he entirely disagreed with the Communist slogan that this was 'An imperialist war'.

In 1936 he was promoted to a full professorship at Berkeley and CalTech. In 1941 he was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences.

In 1940 Oppenheimer married Katherine Harrison. They had one son, Peter, and a daughter Katherine. They lived in a most beautiful house on Eagle Hill, overlooking all of San Francisco Bay, where I (and of course even more his Berkeley friends) spent many happy hours.

In 1942, Oppenheimer felt the deep urge to contribute to the American war effort. The opportunity came soon. He was appointed the leader of a theoretical effort to design the atomic bomb.

By the summer of 1942 it was very likely that Fermi's atomic pile would work, that Dupont would build a production reactor, and that useful quantities of plutonium would be produced. The separation of uranium-235 by the electromagnetic method, though extremely expensive, also seemed very likely to succeed; the separation by gaseous diffusion was less certain. In any case, the committee in charge of the uranium project considered it advisable to begin a serious study of the assembly of a weapon. It proved accurate timing. In 1945, the preparations for the assembly of the weapon were finished just about the same time that the necessary amounts of material became available.

Oppenheimer assembled a small group of theoretical physicists: Teller, who had been working on the atomic pile in Chicago, Van Vleck and myself who had been working on radar, Konopinski, Serber who was then associated with Oppenheimer, and three of his own graduate students. Some members of our group, under the leadership of Serber, did calculations on the actual subject of our study, the neutron diffusion in an atomic bomb and the energy yield obtainable from it. The rest of us, especially Teller, Oppenheimer and I, indulged ourselves in a far-off project--namely, the question of whether and how an atomic bomb could be used to trigger an H-bomb. Grim as the subject was, it was a most exciting enterprise. We were forever inventing new tricks, findings ways to calculate, and rejecting most of the tricks on the basis of the calculations. Now I could see at first-hand the tremendous intellectual power of Oppenheimer who was the unquestioned leader of our group. The ideas we had about triggering an H-bomb later turned out to be all wrong, but the intellectual experience was unforgettable.

In the fall of 1942 plans were started for a more permanent laboratory to investigate the assembly of a nuclear bomb. Oppenheimer chose its location, together with General Groves who was by then in charge of the 'Manhattan Project'. General Groves wanted a remote place in order to keep the secrecy of the project. Oppie knew just the place. He had spent many happy summers in the Pecos Valley in New Mexico, on a ranch, owned by him and his brother. He knew about the Los Alamos Ranch School, an expensive boarding school for boys, which was in bad financial condition. The school was bought out and the Government established its laboratory on one of the most beautiful mesas in New Mexico, with a splendid view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range across 30 miles of the Rio Grande Valley. Pleasant aspen forests rose from Los Alamos to the crest of a minor mountain range, the Jemez, and gave the inhabitants of Los Alamos many opportunities for pleasant hikes, horseback rides and ski expeditions.

Oppenheimer searched the country for the best experimental and theoretical nuclear physicists, for general physicists, chemists and engineers. The task was difficult because many of the best people were already deeply engaged in war work, and some were reluctant to leave this work which promised immediate applicability in World War II, for the remote possibility of an atomic bomb. Nevertheless a magnificent staff was assembled.

Oppenheimer had the great desire to identify with the U.S. war effort, and was quite ready to accept a commission as a Lt.-Colonel in the U.S. Army as was desired by General Groves. The better judgment of some of his colleagues, more experienced in scientific war work, prevented him and the rest of us from becoming integrated into the Army machinery. Of course the Army had charge of guarding the laboratory, of construction of both laboratory and civilian housing, of the civil administration of the town and essentially of all our lives. But in scientific matters the laboratory remained independent.

It was not obvious that Oppenheimer would be its director. He had, after all, no experience in directing a large group of people. The laboratory would be devoted primarily to experiment and to engineering, and Oppenheimer was a theorist. It is greatly to the credit of General Groves that he overruled all these objections and made Oppenheimer the director.

It was a marvellous choice. Los Alamos might have succeeded without him, but certainly only with much greater strain, less enthusiasm, and less speed. As it was, it was an unforgettable experience for all the members of the laboratory. There were other wartime laboratories of high achievement, like the Metallurgical Laboratory at Chicago, the Radiation Laboratory at M.I.T., and others, both here and abroad. But I have never observed in any of these other groups quite the spirit of belonging together, quite the urge to reminisce about the days of the laboratory, quite the feeling that this was really the great time of their lives.

The scientific work at Los Alamos has often been described. I will quote the description by Victor Weisskopf in Physics Today:

He was everywhere at all times, and he worked incredibly long hours. Nevertheless, he still had time for some social life; in fact, the Oppenheimer house with his attractive wife was a social centre. He lived, as far as we could see, on his nervous energy. Always quite thin, he lost another twenty pounds and during a bout with measles reportedly got down to 104 lb., being six feet tall. It is remarkable that his health could stand this pace, because he was never physically strong. The one sport he loved was horseback riding. But in the three years at Los Alamos there was time only for one overnight ride on the two horses his wife fed and groomed for their use. Before Los Alamos, on his ranch, he used to keep five horses for himself and his guests.

One of the factors contributing to the success of the laboratory was its democratic organization. The governing board, where questions of general and technical laboratory policy were discussed, consisted of the division leaders (about eight of them). The coordinating council included all the group leaders, about 50 in number, and kept all of them informed on the most important technical progress and problems of the various groups in the laboratory. All scientists having a B.A. degree were admitted to the colloquium in which specialized talks about laboratory problems were given. Each of these three assemblies met once a week. In this manner everybody in the laboratory felt a part of the whole and felt that he should contribute to the success of the programme. Very often a problem discussed in one of these meetings would intrigue a scientist in a completely different branch of the laboratory, and he would come up with an unexpected solution.

This free interchange of ideas was entirely contrary to the organization of the Manhattan District as a whole. As organized by General Groves, the work was strictly compartmentalized, with one laboratory having little or no knowledge of the problems or progress of the other. Oppenheimer had to fight hard for the free discussion among all qualified members of the Los Alamos Laboratory, but the free flow of information and discussion, together with Oppenheimer's personality, kept morale at its highest throughout the war.

Weisskopf says 'One of the most important factors that kept us at work was the common awareness of the great danger of the bomb in the hands of an irresponsible dictator. After his defeat, it turned out that this danger was in fact not so great; still the work and the spirit continued until the task was accomplished, until in the desert of Alamogordo for the first time a nuclear fire was kindled by man. Every one of us, and Oppenheimer more than anyone, was deeply shaken by this event.'

For his work at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer received the Medal of Merit from President Truman in 1946, 'for his great scientific experience and ability, his inexhaustible energy, his rare capacity as an organizer and executive, his initiative and resourcefulness, and his unswerving devotion to duty. . . .'

It was obvious that a community like Los Alamos would be deeply concerned with the ominous implications of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was one of the most concerned, and had many discussions about this problem with Niels Bohr. Bohr had come to the United States in 1944 and had been asked to help us at Los Alamos. He was quite interested in our work and gave us some advice. However, his main interest was in talking to statesmen and trying to persuade them that international control of the atom was the only way to avoid a pernicious arms race or worse, atomic war. Bohr did not succeed with statesmen but he greatly impressed Oppenheimer and through him the rest of us at Los Alamos.

After the war the American scientists exerted much pressure in Washington. One of their wishes was civilian control of atomic energy rather than continued control by the Army. The Senate responded to the urging of Szilard, Condon and of the American Federation of Scientists, by setting up the McMahon Committee which after long labour, devised the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. Oppenheimer, although originally in favour of military control because it would provide a smoother transition, was an effective witness before the McMahon Committee.

More urgent still seemed the problem of international control. By the intervention of some far-sighted statesmen, President Truman was persuaded to appoint a committee to study this problem, under David Lilienthal. Oppenheimer was one of the members. Lilienthal describes the work of the committee impressively in his 'Journal'. All five members were outstanding men in business, engineering or science. But Oppenheimer brought to it the years of experience of creation of the atomic bomb. The work of the committee, although all its members contributed, was primarily that of Oppenheimer. Lilienthal said of him, 'He was the only authentic genius I have ever met.'

The Lilienthal Report which was then endorsed by Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson called for the creation of an international authority to control all atomic-energy work. The plan emphasized the need for a positive task for the international authority. It should develop atomic reactors for power and other peaceful uses, and also atomic weapons if desired; it should not have merely the function of a policeman preventing individual nations from developing atomic energy and weapons on their own. This wise plan became official U.S. policy. Its presentation to the United Nations was entrusted to Bernard Baruch, a very respected and very conservative elder statesman. Unfortunately Baruch's advisers and Baruch himself, changed the emphasis: instead of pointing to the great joint task of developing peaceful uses of atomic energy, Baruch placed the main emphasis on the 'condign' punishment of violators of the agreement to be concluded. I do not know whether there was ever any chance of acceptance of the plan by the Soviet Union, that country being at the time exclusively concerned with its own national interest. But if there ever was a chance it was lost by the manner of Baruch's presentation.

Oppenheimer was one of the first to see that the plan would be rejected by the U.S.S.R. Most of the members of the Federation of American Scientists held on to hope beyond hope. His realism, as well as his official duties, kept Oppenheimer rather separate from the Federation and other political organizations of the scientists.

His first government appointment was in 1945, as a member of Secretary of War Stimson's Scientific Panel of the War Department's Interim Committee on Atomic Energy. This panel was asked, before Hiroshima, whether there was any technically effective alternative to dropping the bomb on Japan; its answer was negative. Later, an enlarged panel was asked what to do with atomic energy after the war. The members of this enlarged panel were Oppenheimer, members of the other wartime laboratories of the Manhattan District, and several elder-statesmen scientists. One of the committee's meetings took place at Los Alamos, and some other Los Alamos scientists were asked to participate. I remember this meeting very vividly. All of the participants were impressive people who had made great contributions. Nevertheless, whenever Oppenheimer left the room, discussion slid back into fairly routine problems, such as the specific nuclear reactions one should investigate and the kind of research that could be done with a nuclear reactor. On his return, the level of the discussion immediately rose and we all had the feeling that now the meeting had become really worth while.

Oppenheimer's most important Government task was to be Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) General Advisory Committee (GAC) from 1946 to 1952. This most important body included Fermi, Rabi, Conant, Dubridge, Smythe and Seaborg (both later AEC Commissioners) and two industrialists, Worthington and Rowe. It advised the Commission not only on scientific matters but also on matters of general policy. It was a hard-working committee, having about six sessions a year, of three days each, mostly over week-ends. In the words of Seaborg 'At the conclusion of each session, when the AEC Commissioners came in to review our work, Oppie presented a masterful summary of the proceedings. I know that my fellow members of the GAC remember with me that this was pure Oppenheimer at his very best. I regret that tape-recordings were not made of these eloquent summations of our deliberations, for I believe that these would provide fascinating historical material.'

The first task of the GAC and AEC was to strengthen the position of the U.S. in the production and military use of fissionable material. The plutonium production plants at Hanford had to be improved and further ones had to be built. Oppenheimer devoted much time to strengthening the Los Alamos Laboratory after many of its members had left at the end of the war, as well as supporting the other AEC laboratories, Oak Ridge and Argonne.

These latter two laboratories were given the specific task of developing nuclear power. Oppenheimer had the great desire to foster peaceful applications but, like most of his colleagues on the GAC, he was overly pessimistic about economic possibilities. In a talk at this time, he thought that the application of isotopes in research would for a long time remain the most important peaceful application of atomic energy. In a sense he was right; it took about ten years before large-scale power reactors were constructed in the United States and only recently have they become economical.

Oppenheimer was deeply devoted to the support of fundamental research in nuclear physics. The Brookhaven National Laboratory was established for this specific purpose, the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley was generously supported, and many university projects for the construction of high energy accelerators and their use were financed. The AEC was one of the chief contributors to the tremendous expansion in research in physics in the United States, and Oppenheimer and his GAC gave much encouragement to the Commission to do so. Oppenheimer strongly advocated to make fundamental scientific information available to scientists all over the world and distributing special materials, such as radio-isotopes, freely to scientists abroad.

In military applications, Oppenheimer was one of the first advocates of a system to detect foreign nuclear weapons tests. He proposed this while still at Los Alamos. He then supported strongly the programme to develop techniques for detection in 1948 to 1950. This was one of his many functions as Chairman of the Committee on Atomic Energy of the Joint Research and Development Board of the Armed Services. In addition this committee was concerned with the proper application of atomic weapons in warfare. Its membership was half civilian, half military. His efforts to get a detection system established bore fruit on 29 August 1949 when the first Soviet atom bomb was exploded. A panel of the Committee on Atomic Energy including Oppie himself, scrutinized the evidence presented and concluded that indeed a weapons test had taken place in the Soviet Union.

He served the Joint Research and Development Board from 1947 to 1952, also in other capacities. He was a member of the National Research Advisory Committee from 1949 to 1952, and of the Secretary of State's Panel on Disarmament in 1952 and 1953. Most important of these committees was the Science Advisory Committee (1951-1954). It was then part of the Office of Defense Mobilization and later developed into the President's Science Advisory Committee.

More important still, he participated in many summer studies on the effect of nuclear weapons on military tactics and strategy. In particular, in the Vista project, the study group urged that the U.S. should not place its main reliance on strategic atomic weapons and massive retaliation, but should rather develop tactical nuclear weapons to defend Western Europe against possible Russian attack. This advice was very unpopular in many quarters of the Air Force, devoted primarily to strategic bombing.

In 1949, after the U.S.S.R. had exploded its first atomic weapon, the work of the GAC reached a crisis. As a response to the Soviet explosion, Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence proposed that the U.S. should develop H-bombs. The GAC wrote a strong recommendation against the crash development of the 'super'. All members of the Committee agreed on this (Seaborg did not attend, after writing a letter stating that he was quite undecided).

One important argument of the GAC was that there was, at that time, no sufficient technical basis for this development (the crucial invention was made in 1951, by Teller). Another strong argument was that the U.S. should not deliberately step up the arms race, and should at least first make an effort to discuss with Soviet Russia the possibility of an agreement not to develop hydrogen weapons. A more radical minority report was written by Fermi and Rabi.

For about three months the issue was hotly debated in Washington. The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the Congress enthusiastically endorsed the proposal by Teller and Lawrence. Lilienthal, Chairman of the AEC, supported the GAC position and writes in his 'Journal' about the nervous strain of this battle. The decision probably came when Acheson, the Secretary of State, endorsed the H-bomb plan. At the end of January 1950 President Truman decided to pursue with full vigour the design and manufacture of an H-bomb.

He probably could not have decided any other way at the time. However, it is most deplorable that time and again nations have decided in favour of another step in armament without first trying to obtain mutual agreement with other nations to refrain from new escalation of death. The effort of Oppenheimer and the GAC to make the U.S. Government pause and think about this step stands as a most important milestone.

After President Truman had overruled the committee, Oppenheimer tried to resign as Chairman of the Committee, but the resignation was not accepted, probably wrongly.

1953 was a difficult year in U.S. politics. Senator Joseph McCarthy charged nearly anyone he could think of with being a Communist, and hence a traitor to the United States. Since McCarthy's charges had contributed much to the defeat of the Democrats in the Presidential elections of 1952, the new Republican government let him have free rein for a long time.

That Robert Oppenheimer would be one of the victims was foreshadowed in a scurrilous article in Fortune in 1953. The author had collected much material from disgruntled officers of the Air Force who were opposed to Oppenheimer's defence policy. Although they had won the battle for massive retaliation they wanted to defeat the 'enemy' completely. A former employee of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy in a nearly paranoic letter, accused Oppenheimer of being a Communist and working against the interest of the U.S. Oppie had also made some personal enemies, and on the basis of all this, in December 1953, President Eisenhower ordered that Oppenheimer's clearance for secret government work be terminated. This was communicated to him by the AEC in December 1953. Oppenheimer answered the charges in a long letter, and both charges and answer were published in the New York Times, on 13 April, 1954.

Oppenheimer chose to have a security investigation which was organized essentially like a Court of Law with a Board of three judges, and lawyers both for the government and for the defence. He chose to face this investigation in spite of the fact that he was quite convinced from the beginning that he would lose his case.

The ensuing, long-protracted security investigations became a cause célèbre. Many of his scientist friends came out in his defence, a few against him. The Proceedings, published by the AEC, give a vivid story of the discussions within the U.S. Government on defence policy between 1947 and 1953. They have been avidly read by friend and foe, at home and abroad.

Both the Security Hearing Board, by a vote of 2 to 1, and the AEC, by a vote of 4 to 1 decided to withhold security clearance from Oppenheimer. In the final majority opinion by the Commission the only real argument against granting him clearance was the grotesque story involving Haakon Chevalier in 1942. Intrinsically this 'espionage attempt' was of no importance whatever; the counter-intelligence corps did not even bother to investigate the lead until May 1946. But apparently Oppenheimer, in an effort to shield his friend Chevalier, and at the same time not to endanger his position as Head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, had first invented a very foolish 'cock-and-bull-story' and then later denied it.

The importance attached to this incident is the more astonishing as (1) these facts had all been known to General Groves who had cleared him for wartime work; (2) the same facts were scrutinized by the whole AEC in 1947 and again clearance was granted for the most delicate atomic energy work. One of the members of the AEC in 1947 was Lewis Strauss who, in 1954, wrote the majority opinion of the AEC against him. It is hard to imagine that this old story could have attained so much greater importance between 1947 and 1954.

The scientific community, with few exceptions, was deeply shocked by the decision of the AEC. An eloquent discussion was given by Bush, the wartime leader of the U.S. Science Defence effort, in the New York Times Magazine, 13 June, 1954. Personally I felt that the AEC which I had always regarded as our, the scientists', agency in the government, had become a hostile body.

The AEC soon made efforts to reconcile the scientific community. Perhaps most important was the appointment of John Von Neumann, the noted mathematician, as a second scientific member of the Commission. He was universally respected, by the friends of Oppenheimer as well as those of Teller. Soon afterwards Joseph McCarthy's agitation ended when a Senate Committee investigated his own behaviour as a committee chairman, and this led to McCarthy's censure by the Senate. The political climate generally improved.

But it took until 1961 for the Government to make amends to Oppenheimer, President John F. Kennedy invited Oppenheimer to a White House dinner given in honour of Nobel Prize Winners. The most important recognition, however, was the presentation to him of the Fermi Award of the AEC, the highest honour that body can bestow. It carries a prize of $50 000.

3) A brief biography and link to a pbs film on building the hydrogen bomb:

 

4) A biography with photographs, assembled on the 100^th anniversary of his birth:

See especially the chapters entitled “Los Alamos” and “A Changed World”

 

5 and 6) Other short biographical statements, with suggested extra reading: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/ai/aboutopp.htm