New York – He was not a Soviet spy, but a scientist worried about the consequences of technological breakthroughs, Sixty-eight years later, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the top US government scientist in the 1940s, the man who led to the creation of the atomic bomb used in World War II, has been officially rehabilitated. The Secretariat of Energy has canceled the decision taken by the government in 1954, which had excluded the scientist from all federal laboratories, deprived of access to any secret on the atomic bomb, because he was suspected of being a spy in the service of Mosca. The sentence was taken in a period marked by McCarthyism, that of the communist “witch hunt” in which the Americans saw a Soviet agent even in the neighbors’ houses and in the packs of red tomatoes. But to get to rewrite the story of one of the most important scientists in history, for better or for worse, sixty-eight years and thirteen presidents of the United States had to pass.
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With a written statement, the Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm he criticized the decision of his predecessors, calling it the result of a “bad process” that violated its own regulations. Over time, he explained, “other evidence emerged in light of the prejudice and unfair trial to which Dr. Oppenheimer had been subjected” and which reaffirmed “his fidelity and love for the country”. Scholars have called this decision a “milestone.” “I am overwhelmed with emotion,” he commented Kai Birdco-author with Marin Sherwin of “American Prometheus,” a 2005 biography of Oppenheimer that inspired the director’s film Christopher Nolan released Thursday in theaters. The punctuality between the announcement and the film’s release has not escaped anyone, but the delay remains. “It didn’t go as Oppenheimer and his family would have liked,” he commented New York Times the historian of science Alex Wellerstein – the injustice towards him remains, but it’s nice to see signs of reconciliation even if a few decades late”.
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It was the spring of 1954. After nineteen days of secret hearings, the Atomic Energy Commission had revoked Oppenheimer’s right to access the secrets on the atomic bomb, which he himself created. From “hero” to outcast, from strategic scientist for the United States to evil communist. But now comes the fix: Oppy, we were wrong. In 2014, under the presidency of Barack Obama, thousands of pages of the hearings, collected in twenty-six volumes, had been declassified, from which it was clear that Oppenheimer was not even the shadow of a spy. His whole life had seemed beyond suspicion.
The life
Born in New York in 1904 from a family of intellectuals and textile entrepreneurs, raised on Riverside Drive, graduated from Harvard, the scholar had been to Europe before returning to the United States to teach physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Quantum tunnels and positrons, but also a certain style. As a young man he had had a car accident while trying to race a train. His fiancée had passed out. Her father, to compensate for the damages of her son, had given her a painting by Cézanne. Oppenheimer’s mother was an art expert with studios in New York. Communism, however, was there. In the 1930s, like many liberals, the scientist had joined groups of intellectuals led by communists, but his career was very oriented towards traditional America: a Los Alamoin New Mexico, in the 1940s had carried out, in great secrecy, studies that would have led to the creation of the atomic bomb.
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The Cold War marked the end of his brilliant career. In 1953, a congressional adviser denounced him to the FBI, indicating him as a professor of physics in the service of the Soviets. Concerned by the allegations, the then president Dwight Eisenhower ordered that the scientist be kept from nuclear secrets. One of the elements that led to the castle of accusations was Oppenheimer’s reluctance to work on the hydrogen bomb, capable of reaching the power of a thousand atomic bombs. The scientist, as president of the advisory committee on atomic energy, opposed the construction of this type of bomb, convinced that a weapon of this power would not solve the military problems of the United States, but would tarnish its ethical aspect . As an alternative, he said, “tactical nuclear weapons” would be better, those used today in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
The scientist was isolated from his own colleagues, one of whom, Edward Teller, told the congressional committee: “I would personally feel safer if elements of public interest remained in our hands”, under American control and far from those of Oppenheimer. The posthumous re-reading of the testimonies before the commission highlighted how the doubts expressed by the scientist were not political, or linked to Moscow, but supported by valid “technical and military” assessments. But another eight years had to pass before officially restoring dignity to a scientist considered controversial, even if immediately defended by personalities like Albert Einstein. He was confirmed as head of Princeton’s advanced studies department, and in ’63 he was conferred upon him by the president Lyndon Johnson the Enrico Fermi Prize, as compensation, but ended his life in solitude. He will die in ’67 in a state of profound humiliation, without the official acquittal of the United States government. He was 62 years old.