American Prometheus (145 page)

Robert brought his brother Frank (center, inspecting an alpha calutron) to Los Alamos in 1945 to work on the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb.

General Leslie Groves (right, with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson) selected Oppenheimer to direct the bomb project at Los Alamos.

Oppenheimer pours coffee while touring southern New Mexico, in late 1944, scouting out a site for the Trinity explosion.

Wearing his porkpie hat, Oppenheimer leans over the “Gadget” atop the Trinity site tower, just hours before the test. Below, the Trinity explosion.

Hiroshima after the bomb. More than 95 percent of the roughly 225,000 people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilians, mostly women and children. At least half the victims died of radiation poisoning in the months following the initial blast. This photograph by Yosuke Yamahata of a mother and child (right) was taken less then twenty-four hours after the bombing of Nagasaki.

Ernest Lawrence, Glenn Seaborg and Oppenheimer. “Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again,” opined
Scientific Monthly
, “and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus.”

Physics Today
put Oppie’s porkpie hat on its cover.

Harvard University elected Oppenheimer to its board of overseers (with James B. Conant and Vannevar Bush).

A gifted experimental physicist, Frank Oppenheimer (above) was fired in 1949 by the University of Minnesota when it was revealed that he had been a member of the Communist Party. He became a cattle rancher in Colorado.

Anne Wilson Marks was Oppie’s secretary in 1945—and then she married Herbert Marks (lying on deck of the boat), his friend and lawyer.

Anne Wilson Marks was Oppie’s secretary in 1945—and then she married Herbert Marks (lying on deck of the boat), his friend and lawyer.

Caltech’s Richard Tolman and his wife, Ruth Tolman, a noted clinical psychologist who became one of Robert’s deepest loves.

Time
magazine put Oppenheimer on its cover in November 1948.