Speeches that Changed the World

J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

Born 22 April 1904 in New York.

After studying physics at Harvard, and quantum mechanics and relativity theory at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, England, he took a Ph.D at the University of Göttingen in Germany. From 1929 he held posts at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology, where he established large schools of theoretical physics. In 1942, he was asked to coordinate work on the atomic bomb at the Manhatten Project’s Los Alamos lab, New Mexico. He resigned in October 1945. He was chairman of the board of scientific advisers of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947–52: in 1949 the board refused to pass a proposal to begin the manufacture of hydrogen bombs, beginning his period of disaffection from the political and military authorities, including the loss of security clearance in 1953. He continued to work at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University.

Died 18 February 1967 in New York.

The Allies’ race to defeat Nazi Germany in 1944–5 did not simply reflect a desire to bring the war to a victorious conclusion and to liberate the countries under Nazi domination. Among senior politicians, military planners, scientists and Intelligence chiefs there was fear that Germany might yet – given a little time – regain the upper hand through innovative weapons technology.

As early as 1939, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard – both Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe – had outlined the dangers should German laboratories be the first to develop an atomic bomb. Once the United States had entered the war in 1941, President Roosevelt set up a research organization, the ‘Manhattan Project’. As part of this, in 1942 J. (Julius) Robert Oppenheimer was asked to lead British and American physicists in finding a way to harness nuclear energy for a nuclear bomb at the Project’s laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The result was the first atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945. Some years later, Oppenheimer described his reaction: ‘We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita . . . “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.’

The real-life application of the scientists’ work took place, unforgettably, in August 1945, when, in order to bring the potentially long, attritional war in East Asia to a conclusion, President Truman ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (6 August) and then Nagasaki (9 August). The devastation was far more horrifying than had been anticipated; but it brought about Japan’s surrender on 15 August. Three months later, Oppenheimer spoke to fellow scientists, attempting to explain why he and his colleagues had created the bomb. He also considered why the existence of the bomb meant that future cooperation between nations would now be more necessary than ever.

Oppenheimer was a brilliant leader and scholar, who had a gift for languages and a deep interest in Eastern religions and philosophy. Although he maintained that he felt no guilt for his work on atomic weapons, he never denied his sense of moral responsibility. In the early 1950s – in the era of the Korean War and the ‘Red Scare’ – his opposition to the development of the vastly more destructive hydrogen bomb, together with his sharp tongue and views on the need for shared arms control with the Soviet Union, brought him military and political enemies. When he was alleged to have contacts with communists, he was even denied security clearance, preventing his involvement in secret research. However, ten years later the Atomic Energy Commission awarded him the prestigious Fermi Award (1963), recognizing his scientific leadership and groundwork on many peaceful uses of atomic energy, and he spent his last years exploring the relationship between science and society.

I SHOULD LIKE TO TALK TONIGHT . . . as a fellow scientist, and at least as a fellow worrier about the fix we are in.

. . . It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that it is good to learn. It is not good to be a scientist, and it is not possible, unless you think that it is of the highest value to share your knowledge, to share it with anyone who is interested. It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences.

. . . I think it is true to say that atomic weapons are a peril which affect everyone in the world, and in that sense a completely common problem, as common a problem as it was for the Allies to defeat the Nazis. I think that in order to handle this common problem there must be a complete sense of community responsibility . . . the point I want to make, the one point I want to hammer home, is what an enormous change in spirit is involved. There are things which we hold very dear, and I think rightly hold very dear; I would say that the word democracy perhaps stood for some of them as well as any other word. There are many parts of the world in which there is no democracy. There are other things which we hold dear, and which we rightly should. And when I speak of a new spirit in international affairs I mean that even to these deepest of things which we cherish, and for which Americans have been willing to die – and certainly most of us would be willing to die – even in these deepest things, we realize that there is something more profound than that; namely, the common bond with other men everywhere.

. . . We are not only scientists; we are men, too. We cannot forget our dependence on our fellow men . . . These are the strongest bonds in the world, stronger than those even that bind us to one another, these are the deepest bonds – that bind us to our fellow men.

‘We are not only scientists; we are men, too’