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Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb | Harry S. Truman

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President Truman and his wife: Bess Truman, and daughter: Margaret 

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President Truman with his wife and daughter

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Harry S. Truman was the 33th president of the United States. Kids learn about his biography and life story.

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Harry S. Truman was born in the small town of Lamar, Missouri, on May 8, 1884. In 1890, Harry's parents, John and Martha, moved the family (which included Harry's brother Vivian and sister Mary Jane) to Independence, Missouri, a county-seat town of just 6,000 people. Located ten miles east of Kansas City, Independence had links to both the American West and South. The town, in which wagon trains picked up the Oregon and Sante Fe trails, was a gateway to America's western frontier. Most residents of Independence had migrated from the states of the Upper South, however, bringing with them many southern cultural and social mores. As in many other southern towns-and quite a few northern ones as well-black residents lived in a segregated part of town.

Harry's childhood and young adulthood were at times quite trying. He worked hard at making friends, but was uncomfortable in the company of girls his age or older. He was born with poor vision and required glasses, a solution that separated him from many of his peers. Moreover, Truman's mother, to whom he was very attached, directed him to avoid rough-housing with his peers. Harry instead developed keen interests in reading and music. He became a fine piano player and even considered for a short while pursuing a career as a concert pianist. Like other boys his age, he also dreamed of becoming a great soldier.

Harry was a solid and hard-working student who graduated from high school in 1901. He wanted to attend West Point, but his poor eyesight foreclosed the possibility of a commission. Moreover, his father's financial problems, which began in the early 1900s, prevented Harry from attending a four-year college. Instead, he attended a business college in Kansas City for a semester but, with his family's finances increasingly dire, dropped out of school and took a job in the mailroom of the Kansas City Star in the summer of 1902. Truman subsequently worked for a construction company and as a bank clerk.

In 1906, Truman left his position at the bank and went to work on the family farm in Grandview, Missouri, with his father and his brother Vivian. Truman spent most of the next decade on the farm, though the farm itself rarely made much of a profit. Harry kept the books and did his share of manual labor, neither of which he enjoyed. He did, however, find satisfaction in two other pursuits. In 1905, Truman joined the National Guard, which offered a chance to escape the farm and provided him with masculine companionship for the next six years. In 1910, Truman began courting Bess Wallace, with whom he had graduated high school. Bess refused a marriage proposal in 1911, but they continued their romance nonetheless.

Truman's father died in 1914, an event which caused Harry much heartache. John Truman's passing, however, did allow Harry to ease away from the farm. He spent the next few years trying to earn a living as an owner and operator of a small mining company and as a partner in an oil business. Neither enterprise met with much success. In 1917, with the United States on the verge of entering World War I, he rejoined his National Guard unit. After it was federalized, Harry Truman became a member of the 129th Artillery Regiment.

A Military Career and Marriage

The soldiering life suited Truman. He rose to the rank of captain and ran the regiment's only successful canteen. More impressive, he turned his battery-which had a reputation for unruliness and ineffectiveness-into a top-notch unit. In March 1918, his regiment shipped out to France. Truman and his men saw their first action in the Vosges mountains (August 1918) and then in the Argonnes campaign (September and October 1918), the last major engagement of the war.

Truman's service during World War I had a profound effect upon his life. His ability to lead a group of men under the most trying of circumstances boosted his self-confidence; his men, in turn, respected his leadership. Truman established close friendships with some of his fellow soldiers. Eddie Jacobson, Truman's right-hand man at the canteen, became his business partner in the early 1920s. Harry Vaughn, though not in Truman's battery, would serve as an aide throughout Truman's political life. Finally, Truman's service in the war-and the friends and acquaintances he made - would eventually provide him a political power base in the Kansas City area.

Before departing for training with his regiment in 1917, Bess Wallace had tearfully told Truman that she wanted to get married. Truman asked her to wait until he returned from the war, writing "I don't think it would be right for me to ask you to tie yourself to a prospective cripple-or a sentiment." But he made clear his feelings in a letter to her, writing, "I'm crazy about you." On June 28, 1919, following Truman's return home one month earlier, Harry and Bess married in Independence. Four years later, the couple had their first and only child, Mary Margaret.

Help from the Democratic Boss

A few months after his wedding, Truman and war buddy Eddie Jacobson opened a haberdashery (a store that sold men's clothing and accessories) in Kansas City. Truman and Jacobson took out a number of loans to get the store up and running, and initially business was quite good. The enterprise, however, could not survive the nation's acute economic downturn of the early 1920s. The clothing shop closed its doors in September 1922, leaving Truman nearly bankrupt and heavily in debt.

Even though the store failed financially, it brought Truman distinct social benefits. He kept up with his network of friends and acquaintances from the National Guard, many of whom often stopped by the shop. As a respected businessman, he joined several civic organizations, like the Triangle Club (a group of businessmen dedicated to improving the city), and actively participated in veterans groups like the American Legion and the Reserve Officers Association.

In 1922, Thomas J. Pendergast, the Democratic boss of Kansas City and uncle of one of Truman's war buddies, asked Harry to run for a judgeship on the county court of the eastern district of Jackson County. (Jackson County encompassed Kansas City in the west and Independence and other smaller towns and communities in the east.) Pendergast believed that Truman's reputation for honesty and hard-work would attract independent-minded voters and, just as important, that Truman's fellow veterans would support him at the polls. Truman won a tight, five candidate Democratic primary, then easily beat his Republican challenger in November.

As eastern district judge, Truman served essentially as a county commissioner. His main concerns were the county's budget and roads, and the distribution of patronage positions and contracts to Pendergast supporters. Truman lost his re-election bid in 1924 when a feud in the county Democratic Party cost him votes. In 1926, though, he was elected (again with the help of the Pendergast machine) as presiding judge of the county court; he easily won re-election in 1930. As presiding judge, he skillfully guided a major rebuilding and modernization of Jackson county's road system, presided over several significant construction projects, and managed the county's finances during the early years of the Great Depression.

While Truman could not escape the taint of corruption that came from his association with Pendergast, he did establish a reputation for personal integrity, honesty, and efficiency. As part of the Pendergast machine, Truman certainly rewarded the machine's allies; he would not have remained in Pendergast's good graces had he done otherwise. But he also genuinely strove to make local governance as efficient and effective as possible. Indeed, his reputation for scrupulousness benefited Pendergast, who could point to the honest judge as an example of good, clean government. Just as important, Truman during these years proved to be a politician who could win support from both urban-including black and ethnic minorities-and rural constituencies.

Senator Truman

In 1934, Truman asked Pendergast to support his run for a seat in the United States House of Representatives. Though the details of this episode are murky, Pendergast supposedly agreed initially but then changed his mind: he wanted Truman to run for the U.S. Senate. Following a bruising Democratic primary that featured widespread ballot-box stuffing by Truman's (and his main competitor's) supporters, Truman captured the Democratic nomination. He then easily defeated his Republican opponent in November. On December 31, 1934, Senator-elect Truman, his wife Bess, and daughter Margaret arrived in Washington, D.C.

Truman's first term as senator was largely unremarkable. He enjoyed his life in the Senate, especially the male camaraderie and "old boys" network that characterized the institution. The long hours and time away from Bess and Margaret tried his family life, however. Politically, Truman emerged as a reliable ally of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" programs and built especially strong ties with labor unions. He made his mark on transportation issues as a member of the Appropriations Committee and the Interstate Commerce Committee. He helped write (with Democratic Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana) the Transportation Act of 1940, which tried to bring some order to the tangle of regulations affecting transportation industries. Truman also helped design the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938, which laid the groundwork for the growth of the airline industry over the next four decades.

Truman faced a tough re-election campaign in 1940. The Democratic machine that had powered him to victory in 1934 had collapsed during the intervening years. Pendergast was ill and in prison as the election cycle approached. As in 1934, Truman's largest challenge was winning the Democratic nomination. He managed to defeat Governor Lloyd Stark by only 8,000 votes; Truman overcame Stark's support from rural voters by running up large margins in urban Kansas City and St. Louis. According to Truman biographer Alonzo Hamby, the 1940 election showed Truman to be a "candidate of the cities, an urban liberal."Truman began his second term in the Senate in 1941 as the United States prepared for war. During the last six months of 1940, Congress had appropriated more than ten billion dollars for defense and military spending. Truman convinced the Senate leadership and the Roosevelt administration to make him head of a special Senate investigative committee-which became known as the Truman committee-charged with uncovering and stopping wasteful defense spending. He described the committee's work as protecting the "little man" from the greedy predations of big labor and big business. While moderately successful on this score, he did garner both popularity and recognition.

The coming of World War II forced Truman to clarify and crystallize his thinking about American foreign policy. In the mid-1930s, Truman voted for the Neutrality Acts, but this support was politically motivated-his constituents were mildly isolationist-rather than indicative of a deeply-ingrained isolationism. Indeed, Truman had warned publicly of the threats posed by Germany and Japan and of the need for increased American military preparedness. After the outbreak of hostilities in August 1939, Truman supported initiatives like the "cash-and-carry" and Lend-Lease policies designed to succor American allies in their time of need. He also supported American rearmament efforts and the Selective Service Act. Truman explained his evolving position in early 1941, writing to a Missouri voter, "We are facing a bunch of thugs, and the only theory a thug understands is a gun and a bayonet."

Vice President Truman

In 1944, President Roosevelt decided to drop Henry A. Wallace, his sitting vice president, from the Democratic ticket in the upcoming general election. Wallace's liberal political views and somewhat bizarre mysticism offended party professionals and conservative Democrats whose support the President needed. After a set of complicated behind-the-scenes maneuvers orchestrated by Democratic party officials, Truman emerged as the consensus choice for the vice-presidential slot and performed admirably, if not flawlessly, during the national campaign. The Democratic ticket defeated Republican challengers Thomas Dewey and John Bricker by a comfortable margin in the November general election.

As vice president, Truman functioned as a "pipeline" between the White House and the Senate, over which he presided. He also cast the tie-breaking votes to confirm former Vice President Wallace as secretary of commerce and to prevent passage of the Taft lend-lease amendment, which would have forbade the use of lend-lease agreements for post-war relief. Truman, however, was not a major player in the Roosevelt administration and had a superficial relationship with the President.

Truman served only eighty-two days in the vice presidency. On the afternoon of April 12, 1945, he was summoned to the White House. Upon arrival, Eleanor Roosevelt approached him and said, "Harry, the president is dead." Within hours, Harry S. Truman took the oath of office to become the thirty-third President of the United States.

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Harry S. Truman: Life Before the Presidency | Miller Center

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Harry S. Truman was born in the small town of Lamar, Missouri, on May 8, 1884. In 1890, Harry's parents, John and Martha, moved the family (which included Harry's brother Vivian and sister Mary Jane) to Independence, Missouri, a county-seat town of just 6,000 people.

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33rd president of the United State of America

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Ordered the bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan

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American Presidents: Life Portraits - Harry S. Truman

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Each time Vladimir Putin raises the spectre of nuclear confrontation, the trail ultimately leads back to one man.

Eighty years before the Russian president invaded Ukraine, and brought the potential of such weapons back to mainstream attention, J Robert Oppenheimer was recruited to lead a team that would construct the world's first atomic bombs.
Ukraine war - follow the latest developments
The Manhattan Project, set up during the Second World War in 1942, was guided by fear that if the US and its allies didn't make them first, Hitler's Nazi scientists would.

A left-wing theoretical physicist not known for his leadership qualities or laboratory acumen, the American was an unconventional pick but proved a devastatingly effective one.

As blockbuster biopic Oppenheimer hits cinemas, Sky News looks at how the father of the atomic bomb still shapes the world decades after his creation was deployed.
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Oppenheimer was appointed by General Leslie Groves, the project's military leader, to head up Site Y - a secret weapons research facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

But there were, as Oppenheimer biographer Professor Ray Monk puts it, "all sorts of reasons" not to appoint him, notably perceived association with communist organisations that had made him a suspect of the FBI.

Born to a Jewish family in New York in 1906, his student years had seen him drawn to the left as Germany's fascist regime saw friends and relatives oppressed and forced to flee.

During studies at Harvard, Cambridge, and Germany's Gottingen university in the 1920s, he was known for being a "disaster in the laboratory". Of his time studying physics at Harvard, Oppenheimer himself said: "My feeling about myself was always one of extreme discontent."

He may have been unconvincing in the lab, but found his calling as a university lecturer in California. His ability to explain complex science in a relatively straightforward and compelling way proved key to impressing Groves, who interviewed countless scientists before a chance meeting with Oppenheimer.

Crucially, he also recognised the need for urgency.

Prof Monk says: "Oppenheimer knew Heisenberg, one of the greatest scientists in the world, who he worked with at Gottingen, was leading the Nazi bomb project and was worried they would get one before the Allies.

"He was in no doubt at all - the duty of all scientists in the US, and the allied countries, was building a bomb first."
Building the bomb
Los Alamos was one of three sites critical to the development of the atomic bomb.

The others were a factory in Hanford, Washington, where plutonium was made; and a hidden base in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for enriching uranium.

The two elements would act as fuel for the bombs made at Los Alamos, two of which would be dropped on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945.

Cynthia C Kelly is founder and president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, dedicated to the preservation of the Manhattan Project and crucial to having the three sites gain national park status in the US.

"It was a first-of-a-kind effort across the board," she says of the Manhattan Project, named after the New York City district where it was founded.

With the city that never sleeps deemed too busy for such a secretive initiative, the three laboratories were set up in isolated places far away from urban centres and the coast. They brought together geniuses from across America and overseas - including Britain and some who fled Nazi Germany - into one single-minded pursuit.
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"It required creative minds from the machinists to the craftsmen - everything had to be perfect," Kelly adds, with a "classic absent-minded professor" at the heart of it.

"They had to take this energy, which had been uncontrolled up to now, figure out how to control it, and package it tightly enough to fit in the bomb bay of an aeroplane that could transport it and drop it.

"They had little confidence in harnessing this technology in time for the end of the war."
Becoming Death
But harness it they did - and the world would change forever.

The first atomic bomb test in New Mexico happened on 16 July 1945, after which Oppenheimer uttered a line that, along with his trademark fedora and pipe, has become quintessential to his public image.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," he observed after the so-called Trinity Test, quoting a sacred Hindu text in a reminder of his acumen as a philosopher as well as a scientist.

A few weeks after, death followed on an unimaginable scale. On 6 August, a uranium-based bomb named Little Boy was detonated over Hiroshima; and another, Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki three days later.

Both cities were left unrecognisable, 200,000 people died, and Japan surrendered. Oppenheimer was shaken.

"Right up until the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, he had no moral qualms whatsoever," says Prof Monk.

"Even when the Germans surrendered (on 7 May 1945), and it was obvious the Americans were still going to use the bomb against the Japanese, he had no qualms.

"But he thought one demonstration of the awesome power of this weapon was enough."
A new world
Despite its undoubted role in ending the Second World War, which cost the lives of some 90 million people, Oppenheimer was changed by the atomic bomb, believing it made the prospect of future conflict "unendurable".

"It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country," he said in 1946, later signalling his opposition to his government's plan to develop even bigger nuclear weapons.

Oppenheimer was ignored and held in deep suspicion, and his security clearance at the Atomic Energy Commission eventually rescinded. He died of lung cancer in 1967 with none of the power he once yielded.

Nuclear weapons have not been used again, but the threat lingers. America and Russia's arsenals are far smaller than their Cold War peak, but they hold 90% of an estimated global stockpile of 13,000 weapons.

Other nuclear powers include China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Like Putin, Kim Jong Un has on several occasions threatened to use them. The Nuclear Threat Initiative, an organisation focused on reducing nuclear and biological threats, says the world could be "sleepwalking into a nuclear disaster".

Ever since Oppenheimer witnessed the Trinity Test in the New Mexico desert, Cynthia C Kelly says there's been "no way to put the genie back in the bottle".
Beyond the mountain
While Oppenheimer failed in his post-war efforts, his work is the best example world leaders have of why they wouldn't want to risk "mutually-assured destruction" by launching a nuclear weapon.

Two cities devastated beyond recognition have seemingly served as the ultimate deterrence.

"Oppenheimer was invited to say he regretted developing the atomic bomb many times, most prominently when he visited Japan, and his answer was always no," says Prof Monk.

"It can be argued the fact the weapons have never been used again shows deterrence works."
Read more:
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Beyond deterrence, the Manhattan Project also unleashed an era of science and innovation still being felt today, including nuclear energy vital to weaning ourselves off greenhouse gases.

Last year, American scientists performed the first-ever nuclear fusion experiment to achieve net energy gain, paving the way for a "clean energy source that could revolutionise the world".

Some experts have called for a Manhattan Project-style initiative to combat climate change, leveraging the same urgency and determination to tackle a crisis that threatens us all. The startling rise of artificial intelligence, already compared to the threat of nuclear weapons by its very creators, may present another such opportunity.

Unfortunately, nothing seems to focus the minds quite like war.

"Weapons are one part of the nuclear story, and that will be with us until we blow ourselves up," says Kelly.

"Hopefully that won't happen and, as Oppenheimer put it, we can see beyond the mountain."

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Oppenheimer: The 'destroyer of worlds' who built the atomic bomb - and how his legacy still impacts us today

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J Robert Oppenheimer is credited as the creator of the nuclear bomb, thanks to his central role in the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. His life inspires this summer's blockbuster Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy.

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Dr. Oppenheimer's wife: Kitty, son: Peter and daughter: Katherine

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Dr. Oppenheimer's wife and kids

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Los Alamos

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He directed the laboratory that built and successfully tested the first atomic bomb. Then, once it became possible for mankind to build an even more dangerous weapon, he became an outspoken critic of the nuclear arms race and was put on trial by the very government he once served. Here are 10 essential facts about Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic physicist at the center of Christopher Nolan's newest film.

Oppenheimer majored in chemistry as a Harvard undergrad and later made a name for himself as a physicist, but rocks and minerals were his first scientific love. Born in New York City on April 22, 1902, he used to collect rock samples in Manhattan and the Hudson River Palisades as a boy.

"By the age of 12, he was using the family typewriter to correspond with a number of well-known geologists about the rock formations he had studied in Central Park. Not aware of his youth, one of these correspondents nominated Robert for membership in the New York Mineralogical Club, and soon thereafter a letter arrived inviting him to deliver a lecture before the club," write biographers Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin in their book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Encouraged by his parents, young Oppenheimer gave the speech and got a round of applause for his efforts, though he needed to stand on a box in order to see over the podium.

NASA describes cosmic rays as a "puzzling form of radiation" that consist of "electrically charged, subatomic particles that crash into our atmosphere, where they are broken up and fall to Earth in even smaller fragments." You might say Oppenheimer was an early fan. In 1931 he and a student named Frank Carlson co-wrote the first of many scientific papers about the physics of cosmic rays-a relatively new phenomenon that had only been discovered in 1912, less than 20 years earlier.

Oppenheimer hailed from a (non-observant) German Jewish family. In 1937, he used his own money to sponsor his Aunt Hedwig and her son Alfred-plus Alfred's family-when they fled their home to come stateside after Hitler rose to power.

The physicist was just 38 years old in 1943, when General Leslie R. Groves chose him to direct the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico. On paper, he was an unlikely candidate for the job. Yes, Oppenheimer had already received his Ph.D. and was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley at the time. But as the National Parks Service website points out, the "thin, chain-smoking Oppenheimer was 'eccentric' by his own admission, had relatively little administrative experience, had not won a Nobel Prize, and had relatives who were suspected of being Communist sympathizers."

Nevertheless, he soon proved his mettle. The Los Alamos team's core objective was the top-secret Manhattan Project, a secret campaign to invent the first nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer managed everything from the salaries to the living quarters at the LANL, and had a real talent for settling disagreements that flared up between scientists and military personnel connected to the Manhattan Project. It was at this New Mexico lab that Oppenheimer earned the nickname "Father of the Atomic Bomb."

Privately, Oppenheimer said his material wasn't "meant or fit for anyone's perusal," but he had a passion for verse and creative writing. One of his poems, a somber meditation titled " Crossing" even appeared in an issue of the Harvard literary magazine, Hound & Horn. Here's how that one goes:
"It was evening when we came to the river with a low moon over the desert that we had lost in the mountains, forgotten, what with the cold and the sweating and the ranges barring the sky.

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all felt that, one way or another." "And when we found it again, in the dry hills down by the river, half withered, we had the hot winds against us.

"There were two palms by the landing; the yuccas were flowering; there was a light on the far shore, and tamarisks.

"We waited a long time, in silence.

Then we heard the oars creaking and afterwards, I remember, the boatman called to us.

We did not look back at the mountains."
Oppenheimer couldn't help but think of the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu text which recounts a conversation between a human prince and the god Vishnu on the eve of a great battle, on July 16, 1945-the day of the infamous Trinity Nuclear Test. At 5:29 a.m. (Mountain Time), the LANL staff made history by becoming the first people to successfully detonate an atomic bomb.

Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita in a 1965 TV documentary when he reflected on the test, and how it made him feel. It's arguably the best-known comment he ever made, and an eerie testament to the world-changing power his team unleashed at Los Alamos:

In 1949, four years after Trinity, the Soviet Union tested a nuclear bomb of their own. The device worked, threatening to alter the balance of power in the Cold War. Not wanting to lose ground in the arms race, President Harry S Truman signed off on the development of an experimental new weapon, one that would become even more devastating than its predecessor: the hydrogen bomb.

Oppenheimer was very much against it. Since 1946, he had been involved with the General Advisory Committee (GAC) to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Following that Soviet nuclear test, Oppenheimer led a GAC discussion panel about the ethics and feasibility of H-bomb research.

"The committee concluded that it shouldn't be built because this was a weapon of genocide that had absolutely no military necessity, and that our stockpile of atomic bombs was a sufficient deterrent," biographer Martin J. Sherwin said in The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a 2008 PBS documentary.

Nevertheless, the United States ultimately went ahead with the project. America conducted its first successful hydrogen bomb test on November 1, 1952, over the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. The explosion released around 1000 times more energy than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan had in 1945.

By the 1950s, there were concerns that the Soviets had stolen American nuclear secrets-and that didn't bode well for Oppenheimer. The physicist had befriended a number of avowed communists over the years, though historians aren't sure if he ever joined their party himself. And then there was the hydrogen bomb issue: Some of Oppenheimer's political enemies, including fellow scientist Edward Teller, thought his opposition to the H bomb was unpatriotic at best.

"Teller sincerely believed that we were in a dangerous arms race with the Russians, and that Oppenheimer was standing in the way of protecting the country against this dreaded foe," said physicist Marvin Goldberg in The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

On December 21, 1953, Oppenheimer received a letter from the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission telling him that he'd been labeled a security risk. Though he came under pressure to resign from the GAC, Oppenheimer pushed for a hearing instead-and he got one.

Right from the start, the court case stood on uneven ground. "The defense suffered from a lack of access: none of Oppenheimer's defense team had security clearance, and therefore they could not see pivotal documents, including information from Oppenheimer's FBI file and some of his own writings, that the prosecution had access to. Oppenheimer served as the defense's memory, but frequently censored himself, out of a fear of unintentionally spilling classified information," according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation website.

Although the panel that decided his fate conceded that he'd been a "loyal citizen," they voted to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance-a decision supported by the Atomic Energy Commission.

Eighteen people who worked with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos were able to put "Nobel Prize Winner" on their lifetime resumes. But though Oppenheimer himself received three nominations for the Nobel Prize in Physics-once in 1946, and again in 1951 and 1967- he never won it.

However, in 1963, the "Father of the Atomic Bomb" did get to take home the prestigious Enrico Fermi Award, in recognition of his "especially meritorious contribution to the development, use or control of atomic energy."

Before his death in Princeton, New Jersey, on February 18, 1967, public opinion had definitely shifted back in Oppenheimer's favor. Scientists and activists spent decades pushing the government to clear his name, and their efforts finally paid off-albeit not until 2022. On December 16 of that year, the U.S. Department of Energy formally reversed the 1954 ruling that had stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance.

"As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed," Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm wrote in a press release.

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10 Fascinating Facts About J. Robert Oppenheimer

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The enigmatic physicist at the center of Christopher Nolan's newest film may have come to regret being known as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb."

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Inventor of the A-bomb

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Oppenheimer: The Man Behind the Bomb | A "Countdown to Zero" Exclusive | TakePart

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Much has been written about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Accounts have focused on everything from the substance of his life, his intellect, and his patrician manner, to his leadership of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, his political affiliations and postwar military/security entanglements, and his early death from cancer. For another key period of his life, from 1947-69, Oppenheimer served as the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, which is the longest tenure of any IAS Director thus far. Oppenheimer's legacy at the Institute is keenly felt today. His focus on intellectual freedom and interdisciplinarity of approach, highlighted by the active role that he took in bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines to address important questions of the day, continues to be exemplified in IAS scholarship.

Born Julius Robert Oppenheimer on April 22, 1904, in New York City, Oppenheimer grew up in a Manhattan apartment adorned with paintings by van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin. His father, Julius Oppenheimer, was a German immigrant who worked in his family's textile importing business. His mother, Ella Friedman, was a painter whose family had been in New York for generations. His younger brother, Frank, would also become a physicist.

In 1921, Oppenheimer graduated from the Ethical Culture School of New York at the top of his class. At Harvard, Oppenheimer studied mathematics and science, philosophy and Eastern religion, and French and English literature. He was admitted to graduate standing in physics in his first year as an undergraduate on the basis of independent study. During a course on thermodynamics taught by Percy Bridgman, Higgins University Professor of Physics at Harvard, Oppenheimer was introduced to experimental physics, which quickly caught his attention. He graduated summa cum laude in 1925 and afterwards went to Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory as research assistant to J. J. Thomson. Uninspired by routine laboratory work, he went to the University of Göttingen, in Germany, to study quantum physics. Oppenheimer met and studied with some of the day's most prominent figures, including Max Born and Niels Bohr. In 1927, Oppenheimer received his doctorate, and in the same year, he worked with Born on the structure of molecules, producing the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation. Subsequently, he traveled from one prominent center of physics to another: Harvard, California Institute of Technology, Leyden, and Zürich. In 1929, he received offers to teach at Caltech and the University of California at Berkeley. Accepting both, he divided his time between Pasadena and Berkeley, attracting his own circle of brilliant young physics students.

"His lectures were a great experience, for experimental as well as theoretical physicists," commented the late physicist Hans Bethe (1906-2005), who would later work with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. "In addition to a superb literary style, he brought to them a degree of sophistication in physics previously unknown in the United States. Here was a man who obviously understood all the deep secrets of quantum mechanics, and yet made it clear that the most important questions were unanswered. His earnestness and deep involvement gave his research students the same sense of challenge. He never gave his students the easy and superficial answers but trained them to appreciate and work on the deep problems."

When Julius Oppenheimer died in 1937, Oppenheimer became a wealthy man. In 1940, he married Katherine (Kitty) Puening Harrison, a biologist and divorcee whose second husband had been killed during the Spanish Civil War. The couple had two children, Peter and Katherine.

World War II interrupted the work and lives of most American physicists. In 1942, Oppenheimer was appointed to the Manhattan Project, code name for the project formed to develop an atomic bomb.

The project involved several laboratories in secret locations across the country, including the University of Chicago; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Los Alamos, New Mexico. Oppenheimer oversaw the construction of the Los Alamos laboratory, where he gathered the best minds in physics to work on the problem of creating an atomic bomb. Because of his leadership in this project, he is often referred to as the "father" of the atomic bomb.

When the war ended, the government set up the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to replace the Manhattan Project. The AEC was charged with overseeing all atomic research and development in the United States. As Chairman of the General Advisory Committee, Oppenheimer opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb. Known as the "Super Bomb," the hydrogen bomb was a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb. In the context of the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union jockeyed for power, Oppenheimer's stance was controversial. In the 1950s, while Oppenheimer was Director of the Institute, anti-Communist hysteria was sweeping through Washington, D.C., spearheaded by the conservative Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. McCarthy and anti-Communist zealots devoted themselves to rooting out Communist spies from every walk of American life. Oppenheimer was subjected to a security investigation that became a cause célèbre and divided the intellectual and scientific community. In 1953, he was denied security clearance and lost his position with the AEC. Doors that had formerly been open to him were closed. "Oppenheimer took the outcome of the security hearing very quietly but he was a changed person; much of his previous spirit and liveliness had left him," recalled Bethe.

Oppenheimer's concern for the general public's lack of scientific understanding, and the difficulty of conveying the content of scientific discoveries as well as the exhilaration of the creative act of discovery to even educated lay people, led to several popular essays on science. He delivered the Reith Lectures on the BBC in 1953, and these were published under the title "Science and the Common Understanding."

In April 1962, the U.S. Government made amends for the treatment Oppenheimer suffered during the McCarthy years, when President Kennedy invited him to a White House dinner of Nobel Prize winners. In 1963, President Johnson awarded Oppenheimer the highest honor given by the AEC, the Fermi Award.

Oppenheimer died of throat cancer on February 18, 1967.

A number of plays have been written about Oppenheimer, and American composer John Adams ( Nixon in China) composed an opera commissioned by the San Francisco Opera entitled Doctor Atomic, which premiered in September 2005. There are also a large number of books on Oppenheimer and his life, including J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Brain Behind the Bomb (Inventors Who Changed the World) by Glenn Scherer and Marty Fletcher (Myreportlinks.com, 2007) and Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project: Insights into J. Robert Oppenheimer, "Father of the Atomic Bomb," by Cynthia C. Kelly (World Scientific Publishing Company, 2006). In addition to this, Oppenheimer's life, work, and legacy were the subject of the multi-award-winning biopic Oppenheimer, released in 2023. Key scenes in the film, directed by Christopher Nolan, were shot on the IAS campus.

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J. Robert Oppenheimer: Life, Work, and Legacy

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Much has been written about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Accounts have focused on everything from the substance of his life, his intellect, and his patrician manner, to his leadership of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, his political affiliations and postwar military/security entanglements, and his early death from cancer.