#RudolfOppenheimer

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watch and review Oppenheimer (film)

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In 1926, 22-year-old doctoral student J. Robert Oppenheimer studies under experimental physicist Patrick Blackett at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Oppenheimer suffers from homesickness and anxiety and struggles doing the required lab work. Oppenheimer, upset with the demanding Blackett, leaves him a poison-laced apple but retrieves it. Visiting scientist Niels Bohr is impressed enough by Oppenheimer's intellect to recommend that he should instead study theoretical physics in Germany, where Oppenheimer completes his PhD. He later meets theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg at a conference in Switzerland.

Oppenheimer returns to the United States, wanting to expand quantum physics research there. He begins teaching at the University of California, Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology, starting with one student. He meets his future wife, Katherine "Kitty" Puening, a biologist and ex-communist, and also has an intermittent affair with Jean Tatlock, a member of the Communist Party USA, until her suicide a few years later. In 1938, Nazi Germany's progress in nuclear fission research spurs Oppenheimer and his colleagues to replicate their results. Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein then warn President Franklin D. Roosevelt of atomic weaponry's catastrophic potential.

In 1942, amid World War II, U.S. Army General Leslie Groves recruits Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb after Oppenheimer's assurances he has no communist sympathies. Oppenheimer, who is Jewish, is particularly driven by the Nazis' potentially completing their nuclear weapons program, headed by Heisenberg. Oppenheimer assembles a scientific team including Edward Teller and Isidor Isaac Rabi in Los Alamos, New Mexico and also collaborates with scientists Enrico Fermi and David L. Hill; he and Einstein discuss how an atomic bomb potentially risks triggering an unstoppable chain reaction that could ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world.

After Germany surrenders, some project scientists question the bomb's relevance, while Oppenheimer believes using it will quickly end the ongoing war in the Pacific, saving Allied lives. The Trinity test is successful and President Harry S. Truman orders Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be bombed, forcing Japan's surrender. Oppenheimer is thrust into the public eye as the "father of the atomic bomb", but the immense destruction and mass fatalities haunt him. He urges Truman to restrict further nuclear weapon development. Truman rejects Oppenheimer's advice, considering him weak.

As an advisor to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer advocates against further nuclear research, especially the hydrogen bomb proposed by Edward Teller. Oppenheimer's stance becomes a point of contention amid the tense Cold War with the Soviet Union. AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss deeply resents Oppenheimer after he publicly humiliated him by dismissing his concerns about exporting radioisotopes and also for Oppenheimer recommending arms talks with the Soviet Union.

At a hearing intended to eliminate his political influence, Oppenheimer is betrayed by Teller and other associates. Strauss exploits Oppenheimer's past associations with Communist party members. Despite allies testifying in his defense, Oppenheimer's security clearance is revoked, damaging his public image and neutralizing his policy influence. At Strauss's later Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of Commerce, Hill testifies about Strauss's personal motives in engineering Oppenheimer's downfall. The U.S. Senate votes against Strauss's nomination. It is revealed that an earlier conversation between Einstein and Oppenheimer, in which Strauss believed Oppenheimer denigrated him, instead concerned nuclear weapons' possible cataclysmic consequences, with Oppenheimer believing they started a chain reaction that may destroy the world.