From Berkeley to the Bomb: Oppenheimer Before Los Alamos

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Unless you’ve been living on a remote island somewhere, you’ve probably heard the buzz about the new film Oppenheimer. It’s a three-hour biographical thriller about the life and work of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, widely considered to be the father of the atomic bomb. But before the Manhattan Project led Oppenheimer to Los Alamos, he was a professor at UC Berkeley, and some of the initial research into nuclear physics that led to the creation of the bomb was done at the university.

Arrival in Berkeley

Oppenheimer began teaching at Berkeley after returning from work at universities in the Netherlands and Switzerland in the fall of 1928. So in-demand was he that the school worked out a deal to allow Oppenheimer to spend part of his time teaching at CalTech in Pasadena in order to get him to accept the job at UC Berkeley.

His research interests included theoretical astronomy, nuclear physics, quantum field theory, and later, astrophysics. When he wasn’t in the classroom, Oppenheimer enjoyed campus life, and spent his spare time studying other languages, including Sanskrit.

“He thought deeply about literature and philosophy and cared about culture and politics by the 1930s in a way that made him a kind of renaissance man,” said UC Berkeley History Department Chair Cathryn Carson.

It was also at UC Berkeley that Oppenheimer met a fellow professor who would become an important scientific collaborator, Ernest Lawrence. The two men became close friends — Lawrence even named one of his sons Robert, after Oppenheimer.

“Oppenheimer was a theorist. Lawrence was an experimentalist,” said Carson, “And together they both realized that the new frontier of science in the 1920s and 30s was going to be the atomic nucleus.”

In 1929, Lawrence was working in Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory, now named the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in honor of him. There Lawrence designed the first cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator, which later won him a Nobel Prize.

The cyclotron was also the means by which plutonium was first discovered and synthesized at UC Berkeley, an element that would later be used in the first atomic bomb test, as well as in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

Oppenheimer and Lawrence worked together on research to break apart the center of an atom to release energy. It was the early days of nuclear physics. At the time they had no idea that they were laying the foundational science for the atomic bomb.

Into the desert

In 1938, two German scientists released a paper demonstrating that uranium is subject to nuclear fission, setting off alarm bells in the United States. Albert Einstein — who had left Germany by that point — drafted a letter to then U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning that nuclear fission could result in an extraordinary weapon of war.

American military leaders immediately began discussing plans for a secret laboratory to beat the Third Reich to it by creating their own weapon. Los Alamos, New Mexico, was selected as the site for this top secret research facility, and Oppenheimer was tapped to lead the project. The University of California would manage the lab, and brilliant scientists from all over would be brought to the site to work on creating two bombs — one using uranium, and one plutonium.

Lawrence and Oppenheimer lived with their families on a lone mesa in New Mexico. Oppenheimer had previously spent time in New Mexico and had a ranch he called Perro Caliente.

“It’s a crash program. It’s intense. It’s isolated,” said Carson, “Everything that’s being done in the laboratory or in the seminar room is being tracked against the progress of the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific.”

Intelligence from Germany was sparse, so the scientists in Los Alamos just had to work as quickly as possible and hope they were ahead.

A weapon of catastrophic proportions

The scientists worked diligently and in isolation in the New Mexico desert for several years. At its peak, the Manhattan Project employed 130,000 people and the government would eventually spend billions of dollars. In the spring of 1945, the war in Europe was basically over. Germany had surrendered in May of that year, but the war in Japan raged on so the Manhattan Project continued.

A plutonium implosion-type weapon, a style of bomb nicknamed “Fat Man,” was developed in Los Alamos, and the U.S. government wanted to test it. On June 16, 1945, the device was set off in a remote section of desert in central New Mexico. It was dubbed the Trinity Test.

In an interview with NBC, Oppenheimer recalled his reaction upon seeing the destructive capabilities of the atomic bomb during the Trinity Test.

“We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed. Few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture of 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 thought that one way or another.”

On August 6, 1945, the US government dropped the first atomic bomb in the war, a uranium device, on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later they dropped a plutonium device, like the one tested in New Mexico, on Nagasaki.

It’s estimated that 200,000 people died as a result of the explosions and in the aftermath of the bombings. By this time in the war, more than 400,000 Americans had also been killed.

“In the end, the American leaders who decided to use the atomic bombs were thinking about the fact that they had a weapon that could end the war,” said Carson, “And if they didn’t use it, how would they explain that choice?”

It was only after the bombings that anyone outside the strict zone of secrecy realizes what UC Berkeley’s contribution to the war effort is.

“Because this is the bomb that marks the end of the war, it is hugely, extraordinarily celebrated,” said Carson, “It’s a spectacular weapon. And when the news breaks, it’s understood that the University of California has put itself in the service of the nation. And Oppenheimer is seen as the father of the bomb.”

Oppenheimer never said he regretted the use of the bomb, but he always said that he was very sorry that it had to happen.

Over the years the University of California has continued to support the study and development of nuclear weapons. However, UC Berkeley’s connection to federal weapon laboratories is not nearly as strong today as it was immediately after World War II.