Los Alamos Flashcards
Oppenheimer’s quote from the Bhagavad-Gita?
Vishnu: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. In an NBC documentary, The Decision to Drop the Bomb.
He never actually apologised for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but at different times was clearly wracked with doubt and guilt.
The three sites of the Manhattan Project?
By early 1943, two huge nuclear manufacturing sites were taking shape: Oak Ridge in Tennessee, working with uranium; Hanford in eastern Washington State, focused on plutonium.
The heart was in the desert north of Albuquerque in New Mexico, Los Alamos.
The cost of the Manhattan Project?
At its height, 140,000 personnel and $2 billion in 1940s money.
Oppenheimer’s background?
Born into an affluent Jewish family. He learned eight languages. Studied chemistry at Harvard then worked at Cambridge under JJ Thomson (where he had some form of mental breakdown), then the University of Gottingen, where he met Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli and others.
Returned to the US, to Berkeley, California, in 1927, heading America’s first serious efforts in theoretical physics.
The British contribution?
A secret advisory group, MAUD (named after a misunderstanding in a telegram from Bohr) concluded one kilogram of purified uranium-235 would be enough to produce an explosion - ie. enough to fit an aircraft’s bomb bay.
As British intelligence agencies were comprehensively infiltrated by Soviet agents at the time, Russia soon knew too.
Klaus Fuchs, a refugee German physicist, was sent to work at Los Alamos and made significant contributions but was a committed communist and sent detailed bomb documents to the Soviet Union.
The world’s first atomic explosion and one reaction to it?
16 July 1945 at a remote desert test site in New Mexico code-named Trinity (named by Oppenheimer from a poem by John Donne).
Kenneth Bainbridge, the scientist in charge of the test site: “Now we’re all sons-of-bitches”.
Why and how was Oppenheimer’s security clearance revoked in 1954? And its footnote
During the five years of anti-communist paranoia, in part provoked by Republican senator, Joseph McCarthy, his earlier left-leaning politics and donations as well as opposition to the hydrogen bomb were cited as reasons.
The evidence included his association with known Communists including his brother, Frank, Frank’s wife Jackie, and his girlfriend, Jean Tatlock.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had opened a file on Oppenheimer in March 1941, after he had attended a December 1940 meeting at the home of his friend and fellow lecturer, Haakon Chevalier. In early 1943, Chevalier told Oppenheimer about a route to pass secret information to the Russians. Oppenheimer rejected the approach but failed to report it.
Los Alamos scientist, Edward Teller, keen on the idea of an h-bomb, had written to the Atomic Energy Commission.
The AEC’s new director was a fervent anti-communist, Lewis Strauss, who disliked Oppenheimer.
In 1963, a contrite AEC presented Oppenheimer with its prestigious Enrico Fermi award.
Oppenheimer died in early 1967 of cancer, almost certainly due to his chain smoking.
In 2022, the 1954 decision was nullified.
What was Russia’s response to the atomic bomb and what were the implications?
On 29th August 1949 at a remote site in Kazakhstan, it carried out its first atomic explosive test. The Cold War had begun.
It was kept in check for the next 40 years by the prospect of “Mutually Assured Destruction”, known throughout the nuclear weapons trade as MAD.
Oppenheimer the film? Writer, inspiration and main actors
Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Based on the 2005 biography “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.
Cillian Murphy stars as Oppenheimer, Emily Blunt as his wife Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as Leslie Groves, the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, a senior member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
Who are “Downwinders”?
Downwinders were individuals and communities in the intermountain area between the Cascade and Rocky Mountain ranges primarily in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah but also in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho who were exposed to radioactive contamination or nuclear fallout from atmospheric or underground nuclear weapons testing, and nuclear accidents.
For Los Alamos specifically, more than 13,000 New Mexicans living within a 50-mile radius were not warned or evacuated, but exposed to high radiation levels from radioactive fallout with health impacts lasting for four generations.
