Truman, who called Oppenheimer a “crybaby.” Once the Russians had the bomb, however, that dream had no chance with hard-liners like the president at the time, Harry S. Many physicists, including Albert Einstein, were disappointed that the United States had dropped the bomb without warning on an enemy that was already defeated, while Oppenheimer hoped that the advent of the bomb would make war unthinkable and lead to international controls on such weapons.
As a result he became a martyr to the scientific community. That was the end of Oppenheimer's career in government circles and of his ability to influence the future of atomic energy in the Cold War. But only a few years later, in 1954, his security clearance was revoked in an infamous hearing of advisers to the Atomic Energy Commission that declared him a security threat based on leftist ties at the University of California, Berkeley - among other things, a girlfriend and his brother, Frank, were both Communist Party members - and his opposition to building an even bigger bomb, the “Super” or hydrogen bomb espoused by his colleague Edward Teller. The subsequent bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war against Japan in 1945 (Germany had already surrendered) and Oppenheimer was hailed as a hero. Robert Oppenheimer, the cerebral, charismatic and tortured physicist (played by Cillian Murphy, the star of “ Peaky Blinders”) who was tapped to lead the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M., to build the atomic bomb during World War II.
With the biopic “ Oppenheimer,” due July 21, the writer-director Christopher Nolan, known for brain-twisting films like “Interstellar” and “Inception,” addresses an old childhood dread - one based not on science fiction but on real science, namely the threat of thermonuclear war and human annihilation.
0 kommentar(er)
