Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (127 page)

The ‘Little Boy’ design, as reverse engineered by John Coster-Mullen.

Workers at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Though they did not know it, what they were doing was controlling the isotope separation plants that produced the enriched uranium that was used in the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

Preparing the Trinity Test, the world’s first experience of an atomic explosion.

Preparing the Trinity Test, the world’s first experience of an atomic explosion.

The Trinity explosion. ‘A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remember the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multiarmed form and says: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”’

Oppenheimer and Groves at the Trinity Test site.

Photograph taken by Robert Serber of the effects of the atomic bombs in Japan.

Oppenheimer and Kitty in Japan, 1960.

The cover of the first issue of
Physics Today
, May 1948. Oppenheimer was by this time so famous he could be represented just by his hat.

Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard in 1946, recreating for the film
Atomic Power
the moment in 1939 when they drafted the famous letter to President Roosevelt that led to the creation of the Manhattan Project.

The ‘technically sweet’ Ulam-Teller design of the hydrogen bomb.

The Mike Test in 1952, the first successful explosion of a fusion device, the force of which was 800-1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

Oppenheimer lectures Ed Murrow on physics during the making of the television programme
See It Now
.