Oppenheimer, J. Robert

(1904–67)

   American physicist. Oppenheimer was born into a wealthy and cultured New York family. A brilliant career at Harvard was followed by post-graduate work in England, where he worked under Rutherford at Cambridge, and at the University of Göttingen as a student of Max BORN. Returning to the United States in 1928, he accepted professorships simultaneously at the California Institute of Technology and at the University of California. He became famous for developing bombardment by deuterons as a tool in atomic energy research.

   In 1943 Oppenheimer was appointed head of the Los Alamos laboratories, where the first atomic bomb was constructed. In 1947 he became director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he remained until 1966. From 1947 until 1953 he also served as chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the US Atomic Energy Commission. Though he had approved the use of the atom bomb against Japan, after World War II Oppenheimer pressed hard for international control of atomic weapons, and used all his influence in the fight to prevent further research and development of nuclear weapons. These efforts were probably responsible, together with his youthful left-wing associations in the 1930s, for his public castigation at the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy at the height of the senator’s anti-Communist witch-hunt. In 1954 he was labelled ‘a loyal citizen but not a good security risk’ by the Atomic Energy Commission, and was denied access to classified information. However, some nine years later the Commission gave Oppenheimer the 1963 Fermi Award for his contribution to nuclear research.