264 J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
saw the potential for making a
weapon of awesome power—to his
mind “a good, honest, practical
way” to use the new science. But
while laboratories in East Coast
universities raced to replicate the
results of early fission experiments,
Oppenheimer concentrated on his
research into stars contracting and
collapsing under their own gravity
to form black holes.
Birth of the idea
The idea of a nuclear weapon was
already in the air. As early as 1913,
H. G. Wells wrote of “tapping the
internal energy of atoms” to make
“atomic bombs.” In his novel The
World Set Free, the innovation
was set to happen in the year 1933.
In 1933 itself, Ernest Rutherford
touched on the large amount of
energy released during nuclear
fission in a speech printed in
The Times of London. However,
Rutherford dismissed the idea
of harnessing this energy as
“moonshine,” since the process
was so inefficient it required much
more energy than it released.
It took a Hungarian living in
Britain named Leó Szilárd to see
how it could be done, and also to
realize the horrific consequences
for a world heading toward war.
Pondering Rutherford’s lecture,
Szilárd saw that the “secondary
neutrons” emerging from the first
fission event could themselves
create further fission events,
resulting in an escalating chain
reaction of nuclear fission. Szilárd
later recalled, “There was little
doubt in my mind that the world
was headed for grief.”
Experiments in Germany and
the US showed that the chain
reaction was indeed possible,
prompting Szilárd and another
Hungarian emigré, Edward Teller,
to approach Albert Einstein with
a letter. Einstein passed the letter
on to US President Roosevelt on
October 11, 1939 and just ten days
later the Advisory Committee on
Uranium was set up to investigate
the possibility of developing the
bomb in the United States first.Birth of Big Science
The Manhattan Project that arose
from this resolution was science
on the grandest scale imaginable.
A multiarmed organization that
spread over several large sites in
the US and Canada and countlessWe have made a thing, a most
terrible weapon, that has
altered abruptly and profoundly
the nature of the world. And
by so doing we have raised
again the question of whether
science is good for man.
J. Robert Oppenheimersmaller facilities, it employed
130,000 people and by its close had
swallowed in excess of US$2 billion
(more than US$26 bn, or £16 bn, in
2014 money)—all in top secrecy.
Early in 1941, the decision
was taken to pursue five
separate methods of producing
fissionable material for a bomb:
electromagnetic separation,
gaseous diffusion, and thermal
diffusion to separate isotopes of
uranium-235 from uranium-238;
and two lines of research intoJ. Robert Oppenheimer Educated at the Ethical Culture
school of New York City, Julius
Robert Oppenheimer was a
thin, highly-strung boy with a
quick grasp of concepts. After
graduating from Harvard
University, he spent two years
at Cambridge University under
Ernest Rutherford, followed by a
move to Göttingen in Germany,
where he was taken under the
wing of Max Born.
Oppenheimer was a complex
character whose great talent
was to be at the center of things,
and he made influential friends
wherever he went. However, hehad a notoriously sharp tongue
and a desire to be regarded as
a superior intellect. Although
he is best known for his work on
the Manhattan Project, his most
lasting contribution to science
was his prewar research at
the University of California,
Berkeley, on neutron stars and
black holes.Key works1927 On the Quantum
Theory of Molecules
1939 On Continued
Gravitational Contraction