Oppenheimer: Not A-Bomb! By Gene W. Edwards. Posted 7/19/2023.
Here are some of my stray thoughts about J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), the father of the atomic age of armament. He and his Manhattan Project team (at Los Alamos, NM) created the A-bombs used on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan.
Oppenheimer, the film, is coming out on Friday, 7/21/2023. It cost 100 million dollars to make. I suspect that that three-hour movie will gross 300 million — considering the atomic risk we in the world all live with every day.
Here’s info about Oppenheimer’s life. He was born a cultural (non-practicing Jew) child of a German-Jewish couple in NYC. He was such a brilliant student, he was admitted into graduate courses at Harvard early in his education there, skipping almost all the required courses in between. His resume, representing his acquired credentials and expanse of intellectual acumen, became as long as one’s arm!
Like Sir Isaac Newton, he spent a considerable amount of time on mystical studies, being bored with, and considerably knowledgeable in, and in front of, perhaps all the theoretical physicists of his day but Einstein. Oppenheimer studied Hindu scriptures in their original Sanskrit language and was convinced the bomb had been used before, back in ancient times, as historical passages in those texts inferred.
Unlike the chaste, virginal Newton, Oppenheimer was a man of the world, a man of the flesh. He led women, and they led him, on a merry chase, including his wife, Kitty. Indeed, he was so handsome, women literally swooned over him! Take a look at his stock picture on file everywhere. He was definitely not of sound temperament or health practice, but was hyper-ambitious. He was sometimes socially and behaviorally maladaptive, a fish out of water. Tall and thin, at 128 pounds, and tubercular when he arrived at Los Alamos, he died of cancer from chain smoking at the age of 62.
Oppenheimer paid absolutely no attention to popular culture or news events. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes for him, “I don’t care whether the sun goes around the earth or the earth goes around the sun — unless it affects my work.” Oppenheimer, mostly from his association with liberated sociopolitical types, got caught up in the Red Scare during the McCarthy era of the Cold War. He and his were all called communists, not necessarily by political leanings or party association so much as their ideological identification with the whole of mankind, “liberals” yearning for a political philosophy capable of agreeably and equitably welding societies both inside and out (but certainly not via bombs!).
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In the same way The Bomb scared Einstein, Oppenheimer dreaded his leadership in perfecting the A-bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. His sense of guilt went through the roof! Meanwhile, Edward Teller was the chief developer of the H-bomb (hydrogen bomb), post W.W. II. Teller was an odious, jealous, competitive man who disdained Oppenheimer’s A-bomb as comparative child’s play. I heard Teller speak at Stephens College, circa 1970. Of all the public figures of his time, Teller was the kind of scary guy you wouldn’t introduce to your mother, or your dog! His H-bomb always looms, as does nuclear power (destroyable via CMEs and EMPs), as the most likely ender of human civilization.
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Although young and a novice compared to his contemporaries, Oppenheimer was so skilled, and thorough, he was immediately appointed as the director of bomb-making at Los Alamos and put in charge of 6,000 men. He had all the right skills to build the bomb, step by step, from its beginnings to its conclusion . . . to become The Bomb, the A-Bomb! Two nuclear bombs.
There was more to J. Robert Oppenheimer than I can impart, or any human can comprehend, a legend even in his own time! Yes, he was a man not of his time but of all time, a man who grieved that he had so much to give, yet left us so little: the damned Bomb — is really all that he is remembered for today.
It is from “Dust we are and shall return.”
Love,
Gene W. Edwards.
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