Debuting this Friday (21) in the U.S. is a film whose story has long generated curiosity. Based on the book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the film tells the story of Julius Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), a theoretical physicist and director of the laboratory responsible for developing the atomic bomb.
For those unfamiliar with the history of the atomic bomb, here is a summary about the man on whom the film is based.
Oppenheimer was born in New York in 1904, the son of German immigrant and wealthy textile importer Julius Oppenheimer and painter Ella Friedman Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer was a student at Harvard University where he studied physics, chemistry, Latin, Greek, and Eastern philosophy, before traveling to the University of Cambridge, where he studied for two terms. He then transferred to the University of Göttingen, where he earned a PhD in physics.
He then returned to the United States to teach physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the California Institute of Technology. There he conducted research on black holes and neutron stars. He worked alongside experimental physicist and Nobel Prize winner Ernest Lawrence, played by Josh Hartnett in the film.
He married Katherine “Kitty” Puening (played by Emily Blunt in the film) in 1940 and had two children, Peter and Toni.
The Beginning of the Atomic Bomb
The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico, a key location in the film “Oppenheimer,” was the laboratory responsible for the ultra-secret project and the production of atomic bombs. Part of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos (or Project Y, as it was known at the time) was greenlit in 1942, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. It was then that General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project (played by Matt Damon), chose Oppenheimer to lead the project.
They selected a remote location surrounded by mountains to build a secret city where scientists and their families could live. There, hundreds of scientists and engineers developed the Gadget (the world’s first nuclear test device), Little Boy (the uranium atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan), and Fat Man (the plutonium atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan).
Communist Ties
In 1954, during the McCarthy era, the Atomic Energy Commission called Oppenheimer to testify about his previous involvement with communist organizations, due to fears that he was a Soviet spy.
It is unclear whether Oppenheimer was ever a member of the Communist Party, but he sympathized with communist goals, according to the nuclear museum of the Atomic Heritage Foundation. He became acquainted with leftist politics through his tumultuous love affair with the communist and medical student Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh in the film) and was fueled by anger against the oppression that his Jewish relatives were suffering in Nazi Germany. Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank Oppenheimer, joined the Communist Party in 1937.
Oppenheimer’s communist ties were taken into account when he was selected to participate in the Manhattan Project, but his participation was approved nonetheless by General Groves.
Oppenheimer testified for 27 hours in 1954 for the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and in the end, his security clearance was revoked.
After the Soviet Union successfully tested nuclear weapons in 1949 and the U.S. turned its attention to advancing its nuclear arms, Oppenheimer resisted the development of fusion weapons (like the hydrogen bomb) instead of fission weapons (like the atomic bomb) out of concerns that the weapons would be used only against human populations.
In 1967, Oppenheimer died in Princeton, New Jersey, from throat cancer.
Now that you know a bit about the story of this important figure in American history, rush to the cinema and watch “Oppenheimer.”
Source: USA Today