The two atomic bombs of August 6 and 9, 1945, killed an estimated 1,40,000 people in Hiroshima and another 74,000 in Nagasaki, respectively. The bomb code-named ‘Little Boy’ that detonated over Hiroshima at 8.15 am had an explosive yield equal to 15,000 tonnes of TNT. A slightly larger bomb code-named ‘Fat Man’ exploded over Nagasaki, levelling 6.7 sq km of the city. The bombs scorched the earth at 4000°C as radioactive rain poured down on the bustling cities; the survivors and their descendants suffered from various cancers and deformities due to genetic mutation, owing to radioactive exposure.
Just days before, on July 16, 1945, when the world’s first atomic bomb was tested successfully under the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, the ‘Father of Atomic Bomb’ — Dr Julius Robert Oppenheimer — said in an emotionally charged speech: “I know the world will not be the same… I remember the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu (as Lord Krishna) is trying to persuade the prince (Arjuna) to do his duty, and to impress him, he takes on his multi-arms form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’.”
In 1939, prominent scientists Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner warned the US government of the dangers of Adolf Hitler’s Germany making the nuclear bomb first. The result was the Manhattan Project, set up as a research and development undertaking to create the first nuclear weapon. Oppenheimer became involved in nuclear research in 1941. In September 1942, Lieutenant General Leslie Richard Groves Jr, a United States Army Corps of Engineers officer who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon, was appointed director of the Manhattan Project and appointed Oppenheimer as head of the project’s secret weapons laboratory, where the latter’s duties involved developing and detonating the first-ever nuclear bomb. The code name for the test was ‘Trinity’, inspired by the 17th Century poet John Donne, one of Oppenheimer’s inspirations at the Manhattan Project.
“It did not take atomic weapons to make a man want peace. But the atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led those last steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country,” Oppenheimer once said.
Born on April 22, 1904, to a German immigrant couple, Oppenheimer was an undergraduate from Harvard before he went overseas to pursue higher studies. He was invited by German physicist Max Born to the University of Göttingen. “In 1927, at the age of 23, he received his doctorate in ‘Born-Oppenheimer Approximation’ on the motion of electrons in atoms and molecules, an important cornerstone of molecular physics. He later returned to the USA to teach physics at the University of California at Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology.
After World War II, Oppenheimer served as the head of the advisory committee to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) between 1947 and 1952. In 1949, the commission voted against the development of the hydrogen bomb. On December 21, 1953, he was notified of a military security report unfavourable to him, in which he was accused of having links with communists, of delaying the naming of Soviet agents, and of opposing the hydrogen bomb.
In 1954, a security hearing declared him not guilty of treason but barred him access to military secrets. His contract as an advisor to the AEC was cancelled. But 55 years after his death in 1967, the US Department of Energy formally vacated the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 2022, claiming that “bias and unfairness” of a “flawed process” had led to the physicist’s exile from the nuclear establishment.
Besides being the ‘father’ of the most savage weapon in history, Oppenheimer was a student of poetry, a linguist of six tongues, and a searcher for spiritual ideals.
In 1940, he married Katharine Puening, a graduate student in botany at the University of California, Los Angeles, and had two children. He succumbed to throat cancer on February 18, 1967, at Princeton.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, writer-director of the biopic, Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan said the physicist’s story is “central to the way in which we live now and the way we are going to live forever… He gave the world the power to destroy itself. No one has done that before.”