JANASENA Posted September 23, 2015 Report Posted September 23, 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuRvBoLu4t0 Robert Oppenheimer is called the father of that mighty and terrible progeny known as the nuclear bomb. When the first bomb successfully detonated and its mushroom cloud cast its shadow into history, it was not joy that filled the mind of Robert Oppenheimer. As he watched the room around him — some smiled, others cried, most remained pensive — his mind rested on a passage from the Gita. Even with something designed to bring about the end, there was a beginning. Oppenheimer... The first successful nuclear test took place on July 16, 1945 in Walter White's New Mexico. The Trinity test, as it was called, was the culmination of a years long research collective known as the Manhattan Project started at the behest of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941. The aim of the Manhattan Project was to develop the world's first nuclear bomb. Oppenheimer was an odd choice to run the project. He was a certified "leftie" who would have to work within the constraints of a conservative military. Many thought him a probable communist, a community in which his ties were known and formalized. Oppenheimer described himself as a "traveler", somebody sympathetic to communist causes but unwilling to lay down for party line or to follow party order. They would be charges that would hound Oppenheimer for much of his life. Additionally, Oppenheimer had no Nobel Prize, although he had been nominated three times. While not a great mathematician, Oppenheimer had a great sense for conceptual physics and illuminated the modern foundation of how we understand not only electrons and protons, but black holes as well. He was a well-rounded scientist, with expert knowledge across several disciplines. The research that Oppenheimer started would allow others to gain the Nobel Prize that would elude him for the rest of his life. Truth be told, the frenetic Oppenheimer could never commit the time necessary to one field of discipline in order to gain such an achievement, although his work in gravitational contraction likely would have yielded him the prize had he lived long enough to see it blossom in the hands of other scientists. It was this practical grasp of physics, however, as well as his knowledge of the varied fields necessary to build an atomic bomb that led General Leslie Groves to finger the unlikely Oppenheimer as head of the Manhattan Project. Isidor Rabi called the appointment "a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves, who was not generally considered to be a genius". What's more Oppenheimer was incredibly charming. He wowed Dutch audiences when he gave lectures in their native language despite never having learned the language. He was an aesthete who was interested in culture as a whole, and had even had several scandalous romances. His students adopted his affectations, walking like him, talking like him, even reading books in their native languages as Oppenheimer had a penchant for doing. It was this charm, combined with his knowledge and singular focus that would make Oppenheimer the perfect lead for the Manhattan Project. With Einstein... His guidance over the project was unparalleled. It was Oppenheimer who selected the site in Los Alamos where the military research facility would be built and where the Los Alamos National Laboratory still calls home today. Even after eating dinner at a prominent Communist house where Oppenheimer was propositioned to spill state secrets, he was still considered too vital to the project to be let go. Victor Weisskopf: "Oppenheimer directed these studies, theoretical and experimental, in the real sense of the words. Here his uncanny speed in grasping the main points of any subject was a decisive factor; he could acquaint himself with the essential details of every part of the work. He did not direct from the head office. He was intellectually and even physically present at each decisive step. He was present in the laboratory or in the seminar rooms, when a new effect was measured, when a new idea was conceived. It was not that he contributed so many ideas or suggestions; he did so sometimes, but his main influence came from something else. It was his continuous and intense presence, which produced a sense of direct participation in all of us; it created that unique atmosphere of enthusiasm and challenge that pervaded the place throughout its time." The first trials would come in the form the Trinity tests, named after John Donne's Holy Sonnets. A lover of his who recently committed suicide had turned Oppenheimer onto Donne's work. The test was a success. They had done it. "Dr. Oppenheimer, on whom had rested a very heavy burden, grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself," recalled Brigadier General Thomas Farrell. "For the last few seconds, he stared directly ahead and then when the announcer shouted 'Now!' and there came this tremendous burst of light followed shortly thereafter by the deep growling roar of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief." The Trinity test... The success was both a joy and a burden. He lamented the fact that the weapons were not developed early enough to use against Nazi Germany but deeply resented their use at Nagasaki. Oppenheimer would find himself both advocating against an unavoidable nuclear arms build-up with the Soviet Union while similarly aiding American research on the hydrogen bomb. In many ways, Oppenheimer had come to represent the dangerous conundrum of a scientist in a Nuclear Age where such wonderful discoveries fall agonizingly close to the brink of destruction. It makes sense, then, that two days before the initial test, Oppenheimer quoted this from the Bhagavad Gita: In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains, On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows, In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame, The good deeds a man has done before defend him The Bhagavad Gita, or Krishna's Counsel in the Time of War as it is sometimes known in the West, is the versed description of the ambivalence of one at the outset of a necessary war. It is the ambivalence between duty and cowardice. Compassion and justification. Right and wrong. Action and inaction. Of the necessary and the unnecessary. It is the ambivalence that courses history through its valleys and mountaintops. Oppenheimer, like Emerson and countless other before him, would read this book and credit it as forming part of his foundational understanding of the world. Rabi noted, "his interest in religion, in the Hindu religion in particular, which resulted in a feeling of mystery of the universe that surrounded him like a fog. He saw physics clearly, looking toward what had already been done, but at the border he tended to feel there was much more of the mysterious and novel than there actually was ... [he turned] away from the hard, crude methods of theoretical physics into a mystical realm of broad intuition." It was an introspection that led to the development of the most awe-inspiring discovery of mankind to date, and much like mankind was filled with the capacity for such good and such evil. But that is man in the end, a beast of ambivalent nature.
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