Sun in a Bottle Read Free

and difficult scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, a man who would achieve fame through fission and be destroyed by fusion.
    Oppenheimer was not an obvious choice to lead America’s race to build an atom bomb. He was a good physicist, but he was a theorist—and the Manhattan Project was, fundamentally, an engineering project. Oppenheimer was about as far from the stereotypical get-your-hands-dirty engineer as possible.
    The aristocratic Oppenheimer grew up in a wealthy family, but what was particularly striking about him was his quick mind. He mastered more than half a dozen languages, including Sanskrit. He was an adept theoretician but struggled with the more practical side of science; he had difficulty even with basic tasks such as soldering copper wires. After graduating from Harvard, he went to Cambridge in England to work in the lab of the famous experimentalist J. J. Thomson. There, the already high-strung Oppenheimer became unglued.
    Oppenheimer had a difficult time at Cambridge; in his mind, his experiments were failures, and he contemplated suicide. He also contemplated murder. In 1925, he suddenly tried to strangle a childhood friend, and his behavior got even more bizarre from there. On a vacation in Corsica with two friends, he abruptly announced, “I’ve done a terrible thing.” He said that he had poisoned an apple and put it on the desk of another brilliant physicist at Cambridge, Patrick Blackett. When everyone got back to the university, they found out that Blackett was unharmed, and Oppenheimer’s friends were left wondering whether the apple was real or just a figment of Oppenheimer’s feverish imagination.
    The bizarre behavior became less acute once Oppenheimer relocated to the University of Göttingen in Germany. In the 1920s, Germany was the world leader in theoretical physics—home to Einstein, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and many of the other leading lights of the day—and Oppenheimer established himself as a brilliant young physicist. However, he was still depressive. He was also vain, arrogant, and occasionally nasty. He had a habit of making people feel small and insignificant; he detested his “beastliness” but was unable to control it. Nevertheless, soon after moving back to the United States to become a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, he acquired a circle of devotees thanks to his brilliance and wit.
    Despite Oppenheimer’s prickliness, everyone—even the occasional general—was impressed with the young professor. “He’s a genius,” wrote General Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project and the man who chose Oppenheimer to lead the scientific effort. “Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn’t know about. He doesn’t know anything about sports.” This was by no means the most serious of his flaws, as far as the military was concerned.
    Oppenheimer was a security risk—he was absolutely surrounded by Communists. His brother and sister-in-law were members of the Communist Party. His first fiancée, Jean Tatlock, had been a member, too. His wife Kitty’s first husband had been an official in the party and had been killed fighting on the leftist side during the Spanish Civil War. The army knew about all these connections, yet Groves insisted that Oppenheimer lead the most sensitive military project of World War II. In October 1942, Oppenheimer accepted his new post and began assembling the biggest scientific project in the history of mankind.
    Laboratories devoted to the atom bomb effort sprang up around the country. Los Alamos, perched on a mesa in the New Mexico desert, was the intellectual heart of the Manhattan Project. Other facilities, such as one at Oak Ridge in Tennessee and another at Hanford in Washington, were crucial to figuring out the best way to separate bombworthy uranium-235 from the much more common