J. Robert Oppenheimer, most recently featured in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” was a Jewish-American physicist credited with the creation of the Atomic bomb. He was one of the biggest names in the development of nuclear science outside of Europe during the 1930s.
His remarkable career includes leading the Manhattan Project, a government-sponsored program developed during the Roosevelt presidency in response to a letter penned by Albert Einstein and Robert Szilard in which they warned the then-president of the United States about the potential of the German state developing an atomic weapon.
Despite his remarkable achievements, he was a man full of defects, and his life concluded when he was only 62 years old, we’re going to explain to you a few things about his life today, including the cause of death of this historic man who developed a technology that set a “before and after” era in the history of mankind.
Oppenheimer’s Early Life
Oppenheimer was born in New York to two German immigrants. Since he was very little, he took an interest in science and books, he studied in New York, and his love for physics took him to the United Kingdom, where he learned quantum physics from minds like Niels Bohr; then he went to Germany and learned under the best german physicists out there.
He taught in Holland, and after that, he decided to go back home to the United States and settle on the west coast, at UCLA, at CalTech, and at Berkeley to teach a subject that was largely ignored or passed over by the academic world there: Nuclear physics.
After the first world war, a bunch of scientists flew from Europe and eventually settled in the United States, and all worked in the field of nuclear physics, albeit scattered and separately.
But the breakout of World War II, the Pearl Harbor events, and the entering of the United States precipitated the interest of the US government in nuclear technology because they had gotten wind that the Germans were also trying to develop this sort of technology for war purposes.
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Manhattan Project
Oppenheimer’s scientific career was prolific; he is credited as the man who brought nuclear physics to the United States at a moment when there was practically no interest in it outside of central Europe; he was recruited by General Leslie Groves to develop the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, where he brought the most talented physicians of their time to develop a nuclear bomb with the intent of deploying it against the enemy and stopping the war.
Oppenheimer was successful in developing a nuclear bomb. Harry S. Truman dropped two nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and that concluded the war.
After that, Oppenheimer became very vocal about nuclear regulation and fell in disgrace in the eyes of the American government, which revoked his access to nuclear technology credentials following a very intense process of hearings.
How Did Oppenheimer Die?
Robert Oppenheimer’s life was fraught with stress, philandering, courting the Soviets, and navigating the scrutiny of the US government. When in 1954, the US government decided to put Oppenheimer under a magnifying glass to find out how the Russians got wind of the top secret project, which put immense stress on his life.
His mental health took a massive blow, he was depressed, and he also was exposed to radiation during his stint at Los Alamos. But that wasn’t it all. Robert Oppenheimer was a chain smoker; he had a habit of smoking over 5 packs of cigarettes a day, and coupled with the stress of being hounded by the Feds, the radiation, and the depression, all that took a toll on his health.
Oppenheimer developed throat cancer in late 1965, which metastasized to his pancreas. He received the best treatment out there, but that was unsuccessful; he went into a coma on 15 February 1967 and died three days later in his home in Princeton, New Jersey.
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