Topic+17+(Oppenheimer)

J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the Manhattan project. He worked at Los Alamos. Oppenheimer was widely regarded in the scientific community as a genius, but he was also unorganized, and had never held an administrative post. However, many scientists who worked on the Manhattan project have said, in retrospect, he was the best man for the job. (Sullivan 29) Gen. Groves chose Oppenheimer for the position of scientific director for unknown reasons. Oppenheimer was then given the job of coordinating all the scientific work at Los Alamos. Oppenheimer turned out to be the perfect man for the job; he was able to weld this disparate group of scientists into a hard-working, dedicated committee which was able to design the most complex weapon in history in 4 years. His first task was to organize every scientist on the job, and promptly moved them all to Los Alamos, where work was to continue in total secrecy. (Sullivan 29) On July 16, the fruits of his and many others’ labors came to be in the “Trinity test”, which Oppenheimer had named. He watched from 20 miles. When he was later asked of the incident, he remarked, “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” (...) After the war, Oppenheimer pushed against Teller’s proposal for a fusion device. This, coupled with fears of his Communist sympathies, was enough to revoke his security clearance.