When the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb in 1949, US President Harry Truman ordered American scientists to embark on a new programme to build a hydrogen bomb, whose nuclear explosion could be 1,000 times more powerful… Oppenheimer, the government’s chief scientific advisor on nuclear policy and defence, objected on moral and practical grounds, reportedly telling Truman, “I feel I have blood on my hands.” Oppenheimer’s defiance made him a target of the US’ anti-communist hysteria during the Cold War. In the spring of 1954, he endured an exhaustive four-week interrogation that questioned his US loyalty and stripped him of his security clearance. (The US government would ultimately clear his name 68 years later.)
When one of the year’s most highly anticipated films, Oppenheimer, is released on 21 July, people around the world will get to witness the rise and stunning fall of the enigmatic scientist who unleashed a weapon so deadly it had the potential to destroy humanity. But while Oppenheimer publicly grappled with the moral consequences of his creation after World War Two, few people know that the political fallout that followed affected Oppenheimer’s personal life so deeply that he spent many of his remaining days effectively hiding out on the tiny, remote island of St John in the US Virgin Islands.
“In 1945, after [the US military dropped an atomic bomb on] Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer was hailed as a national hero. His image was put on the cover of Time and Life [magazines] and he becomes America’s most famous celebrity scientist,” said Kai Bird, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, written with the late Martin J Sherwin, inspired the new biopic. “Then in 1954, he suddenly becomes a pariah and disappears from national life until virtually the day he dies.”…
Oppenheimer’s journey to St John began with the top-secret Manhattan Project, where he led the team who developed the first atomic bomb. As Bird explained, “Oppenheimer’s view of the gadget he was building never really changed. He was perfectly aware from the day he joined the Project in 1942 what a terrible thing it was, and that he was building a weapon that would have enormous destructive potential.” Instead, Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein and most leading physicists of the time were convinced the bomb’s creation was inevitable, and that if Oppenheimer didn’t create it, the Nazis would first.
“It was a race to build this weapon, and he thought if Hitler had it first, he would use it to win the war for fascism, which would be a terrible, tragic outcome. So, he felt compelled to do this,” Bird said. “Immediately after Hiroshima, he fell into a deep depression… he spent the rest of his life trying to warn humanity about the dangers of these weapons and the need to control them, so he had a very complicated relationship to this terrible thing that he himself was responsible for building.”…
After the truth-shower 