J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist. He was director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II and is often called the "father of the atomic bomb".
Oppenheimer in 1944
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes' Laboratory in Leiden, Netherlands, July 1927. Oppenheimer is in the middle row, second from the left.
University of California Radiation Laboratory staff (including Robert R. Wilson and Nobel prize winners Ernest Lawrence, Edwin McMillan, and Luis Alvarez) on the magnet yoke for the 60-inch (152 cm) cyclotron, 1938. Oppenheimer is the tall figure holding a pipe in the top row, just right of center.
Oppenheimer in 1946
The Manhattan Project was a program of research and development undertaken during World War II to produce the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the bombs. The Army program was designated the Manhattan District, as its first headquarters were in Manhattan; the name gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project. The project absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys. The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion, over 80 percent of which was for building and operating the plants that produced the fissile material. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites across the US, the UK, and Canada.
The Trinity test of the Manhattan Project on 16 July 1945 was the first detonation of a nuclear weapon.
Enrico Fermi, John R. Dunning, and Dana P. Mitchell in front of the cyclotron in the basement of Pupin Hall at Columbia University, 1940
March 1940 meeting at Berkeley, California: Ernest O. Lawrence, Arthur H. Compton, Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Karl T. Compton, and Alfred L. Loomis
Oppenheimer and Groves at the remains of the Trinity test in September 1945, two months after the test blast and just after the end of World War II. The white overshoes prevented fallout from sticking to the soles of their shoes.