Cillian Murphy will play him in theaters in the next Christopher Nolan film, which hits theaters July 19. Who was Robert Oppenheimer, the American scientist known as the “father of the atomic bomb”?
At the end of his life he tried “to find meaning in what science has brought to human life”. While history books portray him as the “father of the atomic bomb,” the life of Robert Oppenheimer remains unknown, to say the least.
Director Christopher Nolan wants to fill our gaps with his new feature film, the biopic “Oppenheimer”, which premieres in cinemas on July 19 and features Irish actor Cillian Murphy (“Peaky Blinders”) and the American scientist .
endowed with a rare intelligence
Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904 in New York into a wealthy family of German-Jewish descent. The boy, who was in poor health but endowed with a rare intelligence, developed a passion for literature, poetry and minerals at an early age, so that he, only 11 years younger, was elected a member of the Mineralogical Society of his city.
A graduate of the prestigious Harvard University, fluent in English, French and German and specializing in chemistry, he flew to Britain in 1925 before earning his doctorate in physics in Germany. Four years later, Robert Oppenheimer returned to the United States and was hired as a teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, which did not prevent him from continuing his research in nuclear physics.
In 1939, Albert Einstein warned then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the importance of a new process, nuclear fission, discovered by the German chemist Otto Hahn, which could lead to the creation of a new type of very high-powered bomb. A Uranium Advisory Committee will then be established.
At the forefront of Project Manhattan.
Robert Oppenheimer, known for his work in nuclear physics, was recruited in 1943 and appointed director of the secret laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the “Manhattan” project to develop a nuclear weapon was launched. This program brings together the best American and British physicists, as well as scientists from various European countries who fled Nazism.
At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the Americans tested their first atomic bomb at the “Trinity” test in Alamogordo in the New Mexico desert, marking the beginning of the atomic age. At 8:15 am on August 6, the US Air Force dropped a 4.5-ton “Little Boy” nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, which will claim 140,000 lives. At 11:02 a.m. on August 9, a second nuclear bomb, “Fat Man,” fell on Nagasaki, killing 74,000 people. Robert Oppenheimer is aware that he has created a bomb capable of destroying worlds.
On October 25, 1945, he was received by the new President of the United States, Harry S. Truman, to whom he expressed his remorse for having used this weapon. “I have blood on my hands,” the scientist reportedly said. As early as 1949, when the USSR began developing its own atomic bombs, the man advocated international control of nuclear energy. He firmly opposed the development of the H-bomb, also known as the hydrogen bomb.
The “World Destroyer” rehabilitated
A few months later, Robert Oppenheimer is accused in McCarthy-America of having sympathized with the communists. He is rehabilitated under the era of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who presented him with the 1963 Enrico Fermi Prize. Robert Oppenheimer died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey on February 18, 1967 after months of battling throat cancer. He was 62 years old.
Note that Christopher Nolan’s event film was inspired by the 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.