Biographical article of J. Robert Oppenheimer
The New Atlantis has a long, interesting article about J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project.LinkIt was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new “gadget,” as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb—a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki—brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated.
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Mark Frauenfelder
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