Robert Oppenheimer: The myth and the mystery

Editor’s note: What follows is the prepared text for a lecture delivered at Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 14, 2018 and sponsored by the Santa Fe Opera during its production of Dr. Atomic, which focuses on the atomic bomb and its creators.

The Manhattan Project is fading into myth. The last of its first-rank leaders, Hans Bethe, died at Ithaca in 2005. The letter from Einstein to Roosevelt eclipses the British MAUD Report on the feasibility of making the Bomb. Los Alamos, a laboratory on a mesa surrounded by a wilderness, a small coterie of scientists witching historic transmutations, eclipses armies of workers and vast factories at Hanford and Oak Ridge. Hiroshima eclipses Nagasaki, poor Nagasaki, even as the war in Europe with its epic D-Day extravaganza eclipses the longer and crueler Pacific War. And to our point here today, Robert Oppenheimer, a century and a decade after his birth on April 22, 1904, has eclipsed General Leslie Groves and half a hundred others as the shining talent, the indispensable leader of the project, the Prospero or the Faust of the tragic epic that the story of the first atomic bombs has become.