J Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), was an American theoretical physicist often known as the “father of the atomic bomb”. Perhaps not an obvious subject for a Radical tea towel, but hear us out...
In 1942, Oppenheimer was appointed by General Leslie Groves to the Manhattan Project, code name for the secret project based at Los Alamos, New Mexico and formed to develop an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was tasked with overseeing the development of the world’s first atomic weapons.
Several of Oppenheimer's associates in the years before World War II were Communist Party members so that in March 1941 the FBI opened a file on him, which was to later become a problem.
After the war Oppenheimer became an advisor of the Atomic Energy Commission, lobbying for international arms control. His security clearance was revoked in 1954 in a hearing during the Second Red Scare in which his previous Communist sympathies were dredged up. Oppenheimer had made political enemies by arguing against the development of the hydrogen bomb, and revoking his clearance stripped him of political power.
These events marked the end of his formal relationship with the US government and generated considerable controversy regarding whether his treatment was fair or an expression of anti-communist McCarthyism.
Oppenheimer was seen by many in the scientific community as a martyr to McCarthyism a modern Galileo or Socrates, an intellectual and progressive unjustly attacked by warmongering enemies, symbolic of the shift of scientific creativity from academia into the military.
He is now the subject of a 2023 film written, directed, and produced by Christopher Nolan and starring Cillian Murphy.
