Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Manhattan Proiect and the League of Frightened Men

Joseph W. Dauben: Ph.D. Program in History

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The story of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American secret military project to build an atomic bomb during World War Ⅱ actually begins in Germany in 1905, with Albert Einstein, and research at the Mathematical institute at the University of Gottingen in the 1930s, It involves such figures as David Hilbert, Max Born, James Franck, Leo Szilard, John von Neumann, Edwad Teller, Max Born, Richard Courant, Otto Hahn, Enrico Fermi, and I.I. Rabi, just to name a few of the most prominent figures as this tragedy unfolds. Einstein's letter to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1939 warning of the German bomb threat, construction of the secret “atomic city” at Los Alamos in New Mexico where the testing of the first atomic bomb occurred in 1945 and its use against Japan in August, are all a part of the history of atomic weapons, as is their very rapid proliferation as Russia (1949), then Britain (1952), France (1960), China (1964), and India (1974) all tested atomic bombs of their own. How this led to the “League of Frightened Men” in the United States, creation of both the Association of Atomic Scientists and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1946) as well as the Federatio of American Scientists, is one end of this story, but the race to build the “super bomb” the world's first thermonuclear device, is the beginning of another J. Robert Oppenheimer was involved in both, but in very different ways.

 

Venue: Academic Lecture Hall, Institute for the History of Natural Sciences / No. 55, Zhongguancun East Road, Haidian District, Beijing